Bilkent University
Department of Computer Engineering
PhD THESIS PRESENTATION
PERSONALITY EXPRESSION IN THREE-DIMENSIONAL HUMAN-OBJECT INTERACTION SEQUENCES
Yalım Doğan
Phd Student
(Supervisor: Prof.Dr.Uğur Güdükbay)
Computer Engineering Department
Bilkent University
Abstract: Personality expression is an essential component of communication between virtual characters and the viewers. Human motion, encompassing temporal facial expressions, body movements, and posture, conveys personalities while controlled by high-level parameters, such as the OCEAN personality model. Research in personality expression, however, focuses solely on isolated behavior, where the subjects don't interact with their environment in a physical sense. Even though object interaction is not a social context, we investigate whether the aforementioned features regarding human motion can be used to communicate the personality of the subjects. Arbitrary object types, actions, and multiple iterations of such interactions are subject to differences in perceived expression, which we quantitatively and qualitatively analyze and synthesize in this work. We applied crowdsourcing to annotate our custom subset of a three-dimensional object interaction dataset and discuss the perceived personalities in multiple object categories. Then, we developed a personality-aware motion augmentation framework to increase the scale and diversity of our dataset. The dataset is used to train a neural motion field-based network architecture to alter a given motion's expressed personality, controlled via OCEAN factors. We validated our approach with a separate user study to assess the resulting motions' personality, accuracy, and realism. We compared the performance of synthetic motions from our neural network and augmentation-only motions. Results suggest that while augmentation-only motions are better at differentiating positive and negative traits of personality, their realism and semantic accuracy are lower than neural-based motions. Neural-based motions' control over the personality via a single factor is observed to be subtle, but multiple factors display a more noticeable difference.
DATE: September 03, Wednesday @ 11:00 Place: EA 516