Interaction retrieval by spacetime proximity graphs

In this paper, we propose a new method to index and retrieve animation scenes in which multiple characters closely interact with one another. Such a technique can be an important tool for animators when they want to automatically extract the desired scene from a large database of animation sequence. Existing methods for single character movements do not scale well for multiple characters as they do not take into account the interaction of different body parts. In this paper, we propose a new distance function that computes the similarity of two-character interations using the spatial relationship of the body parts. For each interaction, we produce a time-varying graph structure based on the proximity of different joints, and compute the similarity of interactions by comparing the topology and Laplacian coordinates of the time-varying graph. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms previous methods which are based on the kinematics of individual characters. The top retrieved samples are found similar in high level semantics while containing style variations. © 2012 The Author(s).