Predicting Perceived Naturalness of Human Animations Based on Generative Movement Primitive Models

We compared the perceptual validity of human avatar walking animations driven by six different representations of human movement using a graphics Turing test. All six representations are based on movement primitives (MPs), which are predictive models of full-body movement that differ in their complexity and prediction mechanism. Assuming that humans are experts at perceiving biological movement from noisy sensory signals, it follows that these percepts should be describable by a suitably constructed Bayesian ideal observer model. We build such models from MPs and investigate if the perceived naturalness of human animations are predictable from approximate Bayesian model scores of the MPs. We found that certain MP-based representations are capable of producing movements that are perceptually indistinguishable from natural movements. Furthermore, approximate Bayesian model scores of these representations can be used to predict perceived naturalness. In particular, we could show that movement dynamics are more important for perceived naturalness of human animations than single frame poses. This indicates that perception of human animations is highly sensitive to their temporal coherence. More generally, our results add evidence for a shared MP-representation of action and perception. Even though the motivation of our work is primarily drawn from neuroscience, we expect that our results will be applicable in virtual and augmented reality settings, when perceptually plausible human avatar movements are required.