Matching and retrieval of motion sequences has become an important research area in recent years, due to the increasing availability and popularity of motion capture data. The main challenge in matching two motion sequences is the diversity of the captured motions, including variable length, local shifting, local and global scaling. Most existing methods employ Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) or Uniform Scaling to handle these problems. In this paper, we propose a novel content-based method for matching of this human motion captured data. We convert the matching problem of motion capture data into a transportation problem. To solve this problem efficiently, we employ Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) as the matching framework. To penalize any strayed matching, we provide a ground distance that works similar to SakoeChiba band of DTW. Empirical results obtained are encouraging.

Articulated character animation is typically performed by manually creating and rigging a skeleton into an unfolded 3D object. However, such tasks are not trivial, as they require a substantial amount of training and practices. Although automatic skeleton extraction methods have been proposed, they generally may not guarantee that the resulting skeleton can help produce desired animations according to user intention. In this paper, we present a sketching-based skeleton generation method suitable for use in the mobile environment. This method takes user sketching as an input, and based on the mesh segmentation result of a 3D object, it estimates a skeleton for articulated character animation. In addition, we are currently developing a Web-based mobile platform to support mesh editing by a group of collaborative users and we depict the system architecture of such a platform. Results show that our method can produce better skeletons in terms of joint positions and topological structure.

Articulated character animation can be performed by manually creating and rigging a skeleton into an unfolded 3D object. Such tasks are not trivial, as it re quires a substantial amount of training and practices. Although methods have been proposed to help automatic extraction of skeleton structure, they may not guarantee that the resulting skeleton can help produce desired animations according to user intention. In this paper, we present a sketching-based skeleton generation method suitable for use in the mobile environment. This method takes user sketching as an input, and based on the mesh segmentation result of a 3D object, it estimates a skeleton for articulated character animation. Results show that our method can produce better skeletons in terms of joint positions and topological structure.