Analysis and Compression of Expressive Dance Animations for Zoetropes

Many animations and videos have high frame rates — meaning many still frames are shown to the viewer per second — in order to give the viewer motion information needed to parse the video. For example, expressive dancing sequences are usually shown in high frame rates because they contain large motions, and often a human emotion or intention. A zoetrope is an animation device with a very low frame rate. By placing a few still frames around a small cylinder, and spinning it in front of a viewer, these few frames can appear to be animated. In order to accurately represent high quality dancing animations in a zoetrope (or another low frame rate application, like compressing the video to use less computer space), choosing specific frames of the original animation to keep is a nontrivial problem. Capturing and preserving certain features in the animation are important and requires analysis of the 3D animation data to determine what exactly needs to be preserved to effectively downsample a given animation.

Faculty Supervisor:

Alec Jacobson

Student:

Partner:

University of California, Santa Barbara

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Education

University:

University of Toronto

Program: