In a previous post, we discussed conducting a study in which we used the Kinect to track the motions of ten children and ten adults performing whole-body gestures, for example, wave your hand and jumping jacks. From this study, we created a dataset of the whole-body gestures. Our paper titled, “Kinder-Gator: The UF Kinect dataset of Child and Adults Motions,” was accepted as a short paper to the Eurographics 2018 conference; a premiere conference that showcases innovative research in computer graphics. The paper details the gestures in the dataset, the data collection, and example applications of the dataset in animation, recognition, and human motion characteristics. Here is the abstract:

Research has suggested that children’s whole-body motions are different from those of adults. However, research on children’s motions, and how these motions differ from those of adults, is limited. One possible reason for this limited research is that there are few motion capture (mocap) datasets for children, with most datasets focusing on adults instead. There are even fewer datasets that have both children’s and adults’ motions to allow for comparison between them. To address these problems, we present Kinder-Gator, a new dataset of ten children and ten adults performing whole-body motions in front of the Kinect v1.0. The data contains RGB and 3D joint positions for 58 motions, such as wave, walk in place, kick, and point, which have been manually labeled according to the category of the participant (child vs. adult), and the motion being performed. We believe this dataset will be useful in supporting research and applications in animation and whole-body motion recognition and interaction.

Interested readers can find the camera-ready version of the paper (preprint) available here. I presented the paper at the conference which took place in Delft, Netherlands.

This was my first time presenting at any conference and at first, I felt very nervous about the idea of giving a conference talk. However, after practicing repeatedly in front of my advisors and peers, I became more confident and gave a successful talk at the conference. It was also my first time attending the Eurographics conference and visiting Delft, Netherlands. Overall, I really enjoyed interacting with other researchers and enjoyed listening to talks about the state of the art research in the graphics community. I also loved that the conference included a city tour in which I got to learn about the history of Delft and the role it played in the history of the Netherlands.