A Computational Estimate of the Physical Effort in Human Poses

This paper deals with the problem of estimating the effort required to maintain a static pose by human beings. The problem is important in developing dance summarization and rehabilitation applications. We estimate the human pose effort using two kinds of body constraints – skeletal constraints and gravitational constraints. The extracted features are combined together using SVM regression to estimate the pose effort. We tested our algorithm on 55 dance poses with different annotated efforts with excellent results. Our user studies additionally validate our approach.