Motion indexing of different emotional states using LMA components

Recently, there has been an increasing use of pre-recorded motion capture data, making motion indexing and classification essential for animating virtual characters and synthesising different actions. In this paper, we use a variety of features that encode characteristics of motion using the Body, Effort, Shape and Space components of Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), to explore the motion quality from acted dance performances. Using Principal Component Analysis (PCA), we evaluate the importance of the proposed features - with regards to their ability to separate the performer's emotional state - indicating the weight of each feature in motion classification. PCA has been also used for dimensionality reduction, laying the foundation for the qualitative and quantitative classification of movements based on their LMA characteristics. Early results show that the proposed features provide a representative space for indexing and classification of dance movements with regards to the emotion, which can be used for synthesis and composition purposes.