Step 1. In the first video a manual tracking of head and shoulders is carried out: the cloud of red points determines the Regions Of Interest (ROIs) head and shoulders are located in. The blue dots are the geometrical barycenters of each cloud. In the second video, shoulders are automatically tracked by means of small green markers.

Step 2. Body Laughter Index is computed by looking at shoulders' correlation and energy: high correlation and energy indicate that the probability of laughter is high; this information is acknowledged only if the shoulders' movement is periodic.

Results of motion retargeting by learning a mapping between motion capture data and facial animation parameters of a virtual agent.








CNRS - TELECOM ParisTech
Abhishek Sharma, Radoslaw Niewiadomski, Catherine Pelachaud

Using the Optitrack face motion capture system, virtual characters in Motion Builder can be animated in real-time. See the example in the video below, which includes some laughs. This method is appealing for Wizard-of-Oz systems, but the ILHAIRE Consortium is currently investigating ways to automatise real-time audiovisual synthesis of such laughter sequences, without the need for a performer to drive the agent.