Mahalanobis Motion Generation

Representing motions as linear sums of principal components has become a widely accepted animation technique. While powerful, the simplest version of this approach is not particularly well suited to modeling the specific style of an individual whose motion had not yet been recorded when building the database: It would take an expert to adjust the PCA weights to obtain a motion style that is indistinguishable from his. Consequently, when realism is required, current practice is to perform a full motion capture session each time a new person must be considered. In this paper, we extend the PCA approach so that this requirement can be drastically reduced: For whole classes of motion such as walking or running, it is enough to observe the newcomer moving only once at a particular speed using either an optical motion capture system or a simple pair of synchronized video cameras. This one observation is used to compute a set of principal component weights that best approximates the motion and to extrapolate in real-time realistic animations of the same person walking or running at different speeds.