An Evaluation of a Cost Metric for Selecting Transitions between Motion Segments
Jing Wang and Bobby Bodenheimer
Symposium on Computer Animation 2003
Abstract
Designing a rich repertoire of behaviors for virtual humans is an
important problem for virtual environments and computer games. One
approach to designing such a repertoire is to collect motion capture
data and pre-process it to form a structure that can be walked in
various orders to re-sequence the data in new ways. In such an
approach identifying the location of good transition points in the
motion stream is critical. In this paper, we evaluate the cost
function described by Lee et al. [2002] for determining such
transition points. Lee et al. proposed an original set of weights for
their metric. We compute a set of optimal weights for the cost
function using a constrained least-squares technique. The weights are
then evaluated in two ways: first, through a cross-validation study
and second through a medium-scale user study. The cross-validation
shows that the optimized weights are robust and work for a wide
variety of behaviors. The user study demonstrates that the optimized
weights select more appealing transition points than the original
weights.
The accompanying video is here (31 MB).
Bobby Bodenheimer 
Last modified: Wed Jun 25 14:15:40 CDT 2003