Spectral style transfer for human motion between independent actions

Abstract

Human motion is complex and difficult to synthesize realistically. Automatic style transfer to transform the mood or identity of a character's motion is a key technology for increasing the value of already synthesized or captured motion data. Typically, state-of-the-art methods require all independent actions observed in the input to be present in a given style database to perform realistic style transfer. We introduce a spectral style transfer method for human motion between independent actions, thereby greatly reducing the required effort and cost of creating such databases. We leverage a spectral domain representation of the human motion to formulate a spatial correspondence free approach. We extract spectral intensity representations of reference and source styles for an arbitrary action, and transfer their difference to a novel motion which may contain previously unseen actions. Building on this core method, we introduce a temporally sliding window filter to perform the same analysis locally in time for heterogeneous motion processing. This immediatelyallows our approach to serve as a style database enhancement technique to fill-in non-existent actions in order to increase previousstyle transfer method's performance. We evaluate our method both via quantitative experiments, and through administering controlled user studies with respect to previous work, where significant improvement is observed with our approach.