Introduction

FORM1 Kinematic Gesture was produced by Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) catalog number LDC2004V01 and ISBN 1-58563-299-6.

FORM is a gesture annotation scheme designed to capture the kinematic information in gesture from videos of speakers. This publication is a detailed database of gesture-annotated videos stored in the Anvil and FORM file formats. FORM encodes the "phonetics" of gesture by giving geometric descriptions of location and movement of the right and left arms. Other kinematic information such as effort and shape are also recorded.

FORM gesture data has applications in statistical natural language processsing, gesture recognition and generation, information extraction from video, and human-computer interaction.

Please go to the FORM website for more information. The FORM2 publication was released in 2003 by the LDC and encoded much of the same data provided here using a more recent tag set.

Data

This publication contains gesture annotations created using the FORM 1.0 tag set. The Anvil annotation files used in their creation are also included, as are 29.5 minutes of the original audio and video recordings excerpted from a lecture given by Brian MacWhinney on January 24, 2000 at Carnegie Mellon University. A second data set, with 5.5 minutes of Paul Howard telling a story in conversation while being motion captured, is also supplied. These video recordings were chosen because they are part of the NSF-funded TalkBank project.

There are a total of 69 data files: 21 movie (.mov) files, 24 Anvil (.anvil) files, and 24 FORM (.form1) files.

The movie files are in Quicktime format with the following specs:

Size	360 x 240 pixels
Compression	H.261
Video rate	29.97 fps
Audio rate	48 kHz
Audio format	8-bit/16-bit stereo

Anvil files can be opened using the Anvil video annotation tool, which is freely available from Michael Kipp. The .form file format is an intermediate data format that contains only the FORM2 values from each .anvil in a comma-delimited, frame-by-frame listing of the following form:
frame,upper_arm_lift,forearm_orientation,handshape,wrist_up_down,wrist_side_side,effort,tension

Sponsorship

This research was conducted using funding from the following grant sources:
ISLE - 9910603
NSF: TalkBank (via subcontract from Carnegie Mellon University) - BCS-998009 and BCS-9978056
NSF: Discourse and Gesture w/ Joshi, Liberman, and Martell - EIA98-09209

Updates

There are no updates available at this time.

Content Copyright

Portions © 2004 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, © 2000 Brian MacWhinney