A COMPARISON AND EVALUATION OF MOTION INDEXING ...

B.1 Breif History
Human beings are experts at recognizing movement from birth. Human beings
perceive visual information in this order: movement, form and color. Since movement
is the strongest, it is instinctively the most important for our survival. In the late
1800’s several people (most notably Marey and Muybridge, with the help of photog-
raphy) analyzed human movement for medical and military purposes. Disney Studios
traced animation over film footage of live actors playing the scenes to get a realistic
motion for the human characters in Snow White. This method is also known as ro-
toscoping and has been successfully used for human characters ever since. In the late
1970’s, when it began to be feasible to animate characters by computer, animators
adapted traditional techniques, including rotoscoping. After late 1970’s humans were
used to produce computer animation.
• 1980-1983: Simon Fraser University Goniometers
During this time techniques and devices used in Biomechanics were applied
to analyze human motion by the computer graphics community. In the early
1980’s, Tom Calvert, a professor of kinesiology and computer science at Simon
Fraser University used the motion capture apparatus together with Labanota-
tion and kinematic specifications to fully specify character motion.
• 1989: Kleiser-Walczak Dozo
In 1989, Kleiser-Walczak produced Dozo, a (non-real-time) computer animation
of a woman dancing in front of a microphone while singing a song for a music
video. They used an optically-based solution from Motion Analysis which uses
multiple cameras whose output is the 3-D trajectory of each marker in the space.
However, with these types of system, the hindrance was tracking points as they
are occluded from the camera.
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