Human movement analysis is a key area of research in robotics, biomechanics, and data science. It encompasses tracking, posture estimation, and movement synthesis. While numerous methodologies have ...evolved over time, a systematic and quantitative evaluation of these approaches using verifiable ground truth data of three-dimensional human movement is still required to define the current state of the art. This paper presents seven datasets recorded using inertial-based motion capture. The datasets contain professional gestures carried out by industrial operators and skilled craftsmen performed in real conditions in-situ. The datasets were created with the intention of being used for research in human motion modeling, analysis, and generation. The protocols for data collection are described in detail, and a preliminary analysis of the collected data is provided as a benchmark. The Gesture Operational Model, a hybrid stochastic-biomechanical approach based on kinematic descriptors, is utilized to model the dynamics of the experts' movements and create mathematical representations of their motion trajectories for analysis and quantifying their body dexterity. The models allowed accurate the generation of human professional poses and an intuitive description of how body joints cooperate and change over time through the performance of the task.
Identifying and monitoring overpronation and oversupination in the long term during activities of daily living is essential for people's ambulatory health. Using an in-shoe motion sensor (IMS) with ...power-saving functions is a potential solution. In this study, we challenged the development of an estimation model of foot function using the foot center of pressure excursion index (CPEI) as an index via linear multivariate regression, which is sufficiently light for this type of IMS. Data collected from 65 and 17 participants were involved in model construction and validation, respectively. We validated ten scenarios simulating daily living activities, including walking on different surfaces, using different shoes, with or without carrying a bag, and indoors and outdoors. We applied statistic parametric mapping (SPM) to determine significant predictors and performed our original feature selection algorithm, leave-one-subject-out LASSO, to compress the volume of the predictors. We successfully discovered significant sex-specific predictors for foot function estimation from foot motion and constructed large effect-sized sex-specific foot function estimation models that achieved high-precision CPEI estimation. In the validation, the model successfully estimated a maximum of 99.0% and 100.0% males' and females' data under the same experimental conditions with the training data and 92.8-100.0% and 85.8-100.0% data in different scenarios. The constructed models are effective and possible to provide applications for long-term foot function monitoring by using an IMS.
During the 1930s, Austrian film production companies developed a process to navigate the competing demands of audiences in Nazi Germany and those found in broader Western markets. InScreening ...Transcendence, film historian Robert Dassanowsky explores how Austrian filmmakers during the Austrofascist period (1933-1938) developed two overlapping industries: "Aryanized" films for distribution in Germany, its largest market, and "Emigrantenfilm," which employed émigré and Jewish talent that appealed to international audiences.
Through detailed archival research in both Vienna and the United States, Dassanowsky reveals what was culturally, socially, and politically at stake in these two simultaneous and overlapping film industries. Influenced by French auteurism, admired by Italian cinephiles, and ardently remade by Hollywood, these period Austrian films demonstrate a distinctive regional style mixed with transnational influences.
Combining brilliant close readings of individual films with thoroughly informed historical and cultural observations, Dassanowsky presents the story of a nation and an industry mired in politics, power, and intrigue on the brink of Nazi occupation.
Human motion synthesis is an important problem with applications in graphics, gaming and simulation environments for robotics. Existing methods require accurate motion capture data for training, ...which is costly to obtain. Instead, we propose a framework for training generative models of physically plausible human motion directly from monocular RGB videos, which are much more widely available. At the core of our method is a novel optimization formulation that corrects imperfect image-based pose estimations by enforcing physics constraints and reasons about contacts in a differentiable way. This optimization yields corrected 3D poses and motions, as well as their corresponding contact forces. Results show that our physically-corrected motions significantly outperform prior work on pose estimation. We can then use these to train a generative model to synthesize future motion. We demonstrate both qualitatively and quantitatively significantly improved motion estimation, synthesis quality and physical plausibility achieved by our method on the large scale Human3.6m dataset 12 as compared to prior kinematic and physics-based methods. By enabling learning of motion synthesis from video, our method paves the way for large-scale, realistic and diverse motion synthesis.
As the two billion YouTube views for “Gangnam Style” would indicate, South Korean popular culture has begun to enjoy new prominence on the global stage. Yet, as this timely new study ...reveals, the nation’s film industry has long been a hub for transnational exchange, producing movies that put a unique spin on familiar genres, while influencing world cinema from Hollywood to Bollywood.    Movie Migrations is not only an introduction to one of the world’s most vibrant national cinemas, but also a provocative call to reimagine the very concepts of “national cinemas” and “film genre.” Challenging traditional critical assumptions that place Hollywood at the center of genre production, Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient bring South Korean cinema to the forefront of recent and ongoing debates about globalization and transnationalism. In each chapter they track a different way that South Korean filmmakers have adapted material from foreign sources, resulting in everything from the Manchurian Western to The Host ’s reinvention of the Godzilla mythos.    Spanning a wide range of genres, the book introduces readers to classics from the 1950s and 1960s Golden Age of South Korean cinema, while offering fresh perspectives on recent favorites like Oldboy and Thirst . Perfect not only for fans of Korean film, but for anyone curious about media in an era of globalization, Movie Migrations will give readers a new appreciation for the creative act of cross-cultural adaptation.   
Motion planning is a fundamental problem in autonomous robotics that requires finding a path to a specified goal that avoids obstacles and takes into account a robot's limitations and constraints. It ...is often desirable for this path to also optimize a cost function, such as path length. Formal path-quality guarantees for continuously valued search spaces are an active area of research interest. Recent results have proven that some sampling-based planning methods probabilistically converge toward the optimal solution as computational effort approaches infinity. This article summarizes the assumptions behind these popular asymptotically optimal techniques and provides an introduction to the significant ongoing research on this topic.
In this landmark dictionary, Roy Armes details the scope and diversity of
filmmaking across the Arab Middle East. Listing more than 550 feature films by more
than 250 filmmakers, and short and ...documentary films by another 900 filmmakers, this
volume covers the film production in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and
the Gulf States. An introduction by Armes locates film and filmmaking traditions in
the region from early efforts in the silent era to state-funded productions by
isolated filmmakers and politically engaged documentarians. Part 1 lists
biographical information about the filmmakers and their feature films. Part 2
details key feature films from the countries represented. Part 3 indexes
feature-film titles in English and French with details about the director, date, and
country of origin.
•Utilize depth map for 3D accurate relative pose localization.•Augment the 2D person pose detection module with denoising auto-encoders for filling 2D missing pose information.•Introduced a novel ...metric 3D intersection over union (IOU) for pose tracking.•State of the art results on MuPoTS-3D dataset and competing results on pose track 2018 dataset.
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3D animation of human body movement is quite challenging as it involves using a huge setup with several motion trackers all over the persons body to track the movements of every limb. This is time- consuming and may cause the person discomfort in wearing exoskeleton body suits with motion sensors. In this work, we present a trivial yet effective solution to generate simple 3D animation of human movement of multiple persons from a 2D video using deep learning. Although significant improvement has been achieved recently in 3D human pose estimation, most of the prior works work well in case of single person pose estimation and multi-person pose estimation is still a challenging problem. In this work, we firstly propose a supervised multi-person 3D pose estimation and animation framework namely AnimePose for a given input RGB video sequence. The pipeline of the proposed system consists of various modules: i) Multi-Person 2D pose estimation, ii) Depth Map estimation, iii) Lifting 2D poses to 3D poses, iv) Person trajectory prediction and human pose tracking. Our proposed system produces comparable results on previous state-of-the-art 3D multi-person pose estimation methods on publicly available dataset MuPoTS-3D dataset and it also outperforms previous competing human pose tracking methods by a significant margin of 11.7% performance gain on MOTA score on Posetrack 2018 dataset.
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