Vitality Forms Analysis and Automatic Recognition

The form of an action, i.e. the way it is performed, conveys important information about the performer’s attitude. In this paper we investigate spatiotemporal characteristics of different gestures performed with specific vitality forms and we study whether it is possible to recognize these aspects of action automatically. As the first step, we created a new dataset of 7 gestures performed with a vitality form (gentle and rude) or without a vitality form (neutral, slow and fast). Thousand repetitions were collected from 2 professional actors. Next, we identified 22 features from the motion capture data. According to the results, vitality forms are not merely characterized by a velocity/acceleration modulation but by a combination of different spatiotemporal properties. We also perform automatic classification of vitality forms with F-score of 87.3%.