Understanding visuo‐motor primitives for motion synthesis and analysis

The problem addressed in this paper concerns the representation of human movement in terms of atomic visuo-motor primitives considering both generation and perception of movement. We introduce the concept of kinetology, the phonology of human movement, and five principles on which such a system should be based: compactness, view-invariance, reproducibility, selectivity, and reconstructivity. We propose visuo-motor primitives and demonstrate their kinetological properties. Further evaluation is accomplished with experiments on compression and decompression. Our long-term goal is to demonstrate that action has a space characterized by a visuo-motor language. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.