A Relational Database for Human Motion Data

Motion capture data have been widely used in applications ranging from video games and animations to simulations and virtual environments. Moreover, all data-driven approaches for analysis and synthesis of motions are depending on motion capture data. Although multiple large motion capture data sets are freely available for research, there is no system which can provide a centralized access to all of them in an organized manner. In this paper we show that using a relational database management system (RDBMS) to store data does not only provide such a centralized access to the data, but also allows to include other sensor modalities (e.g. accelerometer data) and various semantic annotations. We present two applications for our system: A motion capture player where motions sequences can be retrieved from large datasets using SQL queries and the automatic construction of statistical models which can further be used for complex motion analysis and motions synthesis tasks.