Action synopsis: pose selection and illustration

Abstract

Illustrating motion in still imagery for the purpose of summary, abstraction and motion description is important for a diverse spectrum of fields, ranging from arts to sciences. In this paper, we introduce a method that produces an action synopsis for presenting motion in still images. The method carefully selects key poses based on an analysis of a skeletal animation sequence, to facilitate expressing complex motions in a single image or a small number of concise views. Our approach is to embed the high-dimensional motion curve in a low-dimensional Euclidean space, where the main characteristics of the skeletal action are kept. The lower complexity of the embedded motion curve allows a simple iterative method which analyzes the curve and locates significant points, associated with the key poses of the original motion. We present methods for illustrating the selected poses in an image as a means to convey the action. We applied our methods to a variety of motions of human actions given either as 3D animation sequences or as video clips, and generated images that depict their synopsis.