Evaluation of human movement qualities: A methodology based on transferable-utility games on graphs.

Abstract A novel computational method for the analysis of expressive full-body movement qualities is introduced, which exploits concepts and tools from graph theory and game theory. The human skeletal structure is modeled as an undirected graph, where the joints are the vertices and the edge set contains both physical and nonphysical links. Physical links correspond to connections between adjacent physical body joints (e.g., the forearm, which connects the elbow to the wrist). Nonphysical links act as “bridges” between parts of the body not directly connected by the skeletal structure, but sharing very similar feature values. The edge weights depend on features obtained by using Motion Capture data. Then, a mathematical game is constructed over the graph structure, where the vertices represent the players and the edges represent communication channels between them. Hence, the body movement is modeled in terms of a game built on the graph structure. Since the vertices and the edges contribute to the overall quality of the movement, the adopted game-theoretical model is of cooperative nature. A game-theoretical concept, called Shapley value, is exploited as a centrality index to estimate the contribution of each vertex to a shared goal (e.g., to the way a particular movement quality is transferred among the vertices). The proposed method is applied to a data set of Motion Capture data of subjects performing expressive movements, recorded in the framework of the H2020-ICT-2015 EU Project WhoLoDance, Project no. 688865. Results are presented: development of novel method, contribution to the scientific community with a new data corpus, application the discussed method to 100 movement recordings and creation of database archive of stimuli for further use in research studies in the framework of the WhoLoDance Project.