A Search for Upper-Body Motion Primitives...

In search for the motion primitives for a communicative human body language
Danish Research Council project, CVMT, 2004-2007

The Vision
The general vision is effective Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI), which operates as natural and intuitive as do Human-Human-Interaction. The more specific vision for this project is that visual cues become available for this purpose in a manner similar to that of speech, where speech technology now allows natural languages to play an operational and important role of bi-directional communication for HCI.

The visual cues in question relate to human body language (HBL) with gestures etc. The specific vision includes the existence of a basic set of communicative and purposeful body motion primitives, comparable to the phonemes of speech technology, which support analysis as well as synthesis of speech. Both computer vision and graphics animation will be used, in attempting to derive such primitives. It is expected that the ultimate and standard set of HBL primitives may require some iterations and further efforts, but already from this project we hope to make an impact on approaches to human-computer interfaces.

Project description