Data-driven crowd motion control with multi-touch gestures

Shen, Y., Henry, J., Wang, H., Ho, E. S.L. , Komura, T. and Shum, H. P. H. (2018) Data-driven crowd motion control with multi-touch gestures. Computer Graphics Forum, 37(6), pp. 382-394. (doi: 10.1111/cgf.13333)

Abstract

Controlling a crowd using multi-touch devices appeals to the computer games and animation industries, as such devices provide a high-dimensional control signal that can effectively define the crowd formation and movement. However, existing works relying on pre-defined control schemes require the users to learn a scheme that may not be intuitive. We propose a data-driven gesture-based crowd control system, in which the control scheme is learned from example gestures provided by different users. In particular, we build a database with pairwise samples of gestures and crowd motions. To effectively generalize the gesture style of different users, such as the use of different numbers of fingers, we propose a set of gesture features for representing a set of hand gesture trajectories. Similarly, to represent crowd motion trajectories of different numbers of characters over time, we propose a set of crowd motion features that are extracted from a Gaussian mixture model. Given a run-time gesture, our system extracts the K nearest gestures from the database and interpolates the corresponding crowd motions in order to generate the run-time control. Our system is accurate and efficient, making it suitable for real-time applications such as real-time strategy games and interactive animation controls.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Ho, Dr Edmond S. L
• Authors: Shen, Y., Henry, J., Wang, H., Ho, E. S.L., Komura, T., and Shum, H. P. H.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• Journal Name: Computer Graphics Forum
• Publisher: Wiley
• ISSN: 0167-7055
• ISSN (Online): 1467-8659
• Published Online: 26 March 2018
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2018 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Computer Graphics Forum 37(6):382 - 394
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence