An Information Retrieval System for Motion Capture Data

Motion capturing has become an important tool in fields such as sports sciences, biometrics, and particularly in computer animation, where large collections of motion material are accumulated in the production process. In order to fully exploit motion databases for reuse and for the synthesis of new motions, one needs efficient retrieval and browsing methods to identify similar motions. So far, only ad-hoc methods for content-based motion retrieval have been proposed, which lack efficiency and rely on quantitative, numerical similarity measures, making it difficult to identify logically related motions. We propose an efficient motion retrieval system based on the query-by-example paradigm, which employs qualitative, geometric similarity measures. This allows for intuitive and interactive browsing in a purely content-based fashion without relying on textual annotations. We have incorporated this technology in a novel user interface facilitating query formulation as well as visualization and ranking of search results.