Database Techniques with Motion Capture

SIGGRAPH tutorial, San Diego
Monday Aug 6, 3:15 - 5:30 pm, 2007
Nancy Pollard, Jessica Hodgins, Christos Faloutsos (CMU)

Summary

Motion-capture databases are now large, varied, and widely used. This course covers techniques that are useful for organizing, processing, and navigating such databases. Topics include choice of distance function, indexing for fast retrieval, and time-series prediction for stitching, segmentation, and outlier detection. Current and potential applications are discussed. Prerequisites Typical knowledge derived from undergraduate studies in computer science.

Outline

Introduction
- Overview
- The CMU motion capture database
Database techniques:
- Similarity Search and Database indexing
- - Why we need similarity search
  - Distance functions (Euclidean, LP norms, time-warping)
  - Fast searching (R-trees, M-trees)
- Feature extraction
- - DFT
  - Wavelets
  - SVD/PCA
  - FastMap
  - ICA
- Linear Forecasting
- - Main idea
  - AR methodology
  - Multivariate regression
  - Recursive Least Squares
Wrapup and discussion of possible future applications

Material

Foils in pdf: part1 and part2

Intended Audience

Researchers who want to get up to speed with the major tools for indexing and processing large motion-capture databases. Also practitioners who want a concise, intuitive overview of the state of the art.

Instructors

	Nancy Pollard is an Associate Professor in the Robotics Institute and the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1994. She was awarded an NSF CAREER grant in 2001 for research on ``Quantifying Humanlike Enveloping Grasps'', and the Okawa Research Grant in 2006 for her work on ``Dexterity and Natural Motion for Computer Graphics and Robotics''. Her primary research objective is to understand how to create natural motion for animated human characters and humanoid robots, with particular focus on grasping, manipulation and hands.
	Jessica Hodgins joined the Robotics Institute and Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University as a Associate Professor in fall of 2000. Prior to moving to CMU, she was an an Associate Professor and Assistant Dean in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1989. She has received a NSF Young Investigator Award, a Packard Fellowship, and a Sloan Fellowship. She was editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics from 2000-2002 and Papers Chair for ACM SIGGRAPH 2003.
	Christos Faloutsos is a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He has received the Presidential Young Investigator Award by the National Science Foundation (1989), the Research Contributions Award in ICDM 2006, ten ``best paper'' awards, and several teaching awards. He has served as a member of the executive committee of SIGKDD; he has published over 160 refereed articles, 11 book chapters and one monograph. He holds five patents and he has given over 20 tutorials and 10 invited distinguished lectures. His research interests include data mining for streams and graphs, fractals, database performance, and indexing for multimedia and bio-informatics data.