Human motion capture data retrieval based on semantic thumbnail

We present a method for the efficient retrieval and browsing of immense amounts of realistic 3D human body motion capture data. The proposed method organizes motion capture data based on statistical K-means (SK–means), democratic decision making, unsupervised learning, and visual key frame extraction, thus achieving intuitive retrieval by browsing thumbnails of semantic key frames. We apply three steps for the efficient retrieval of motion capture data. The first is obtaining the basic type clusters by clustering motion capture data using the novel SK-means algorithm, and after which, immediately performing character matching. The second is learning the retrieval information of users during the retrieval process and updating the successful retrieval rate of each data; the search results are then ranked on the basis of successful retrieval rate by democratic decision making to improve accuracy. The last step is generating thumbnails with semantic generalization, which is conducted by using a novel key frame extraction algorithm based on visualized data analysis. The experiment demonstrates that this method can be utilised for the efficient organization and retrieval of enormous motion capture data.