Automatic Key-Frame Extraction from Optical Motion Capture Data

Optical motion capture is an increasingly popular animation technique. In the last few years, plenty of methods have been proposed for key-frame extraction of motion capture data, and it is a common method to extract key-frame using quaternion. Here,one main difficulty is due to the fact that previous algorithms often need to manually set various parameters. In addition, it is problematic to predefine the appropriate threshold without knowing the data content. In this paper, we present a novel adaptive threshold-based extraction method. Key-frame can be found according to quaternion distance. We propose a simple and efficient algorithm to extract key-frame from a motion sequence based on adaptive threshold. It is convenient with no need to predefine parameters to meet certain compression ratio. Experimental results of many motion captures with different traits demonstrate good performance of the proposed algorithm. Our experiments show that one can typically cut down the process of extraction from several minutes to a couple of seconds.