About

We introduce the POETICON enacted scenario corpus - a corpus for (inter)action understanding that contains six everyday scenarios taking place in a kitchen / living-room setting. Each scenario was acted out several times by different pairs of actors and contains simple object interactions as well as spoken dialogue. In addition, each scenario was first recorded with several HD cameras and also with motion- capturing of the actors and several key objects. Having access to the motion capture data allows not only for kinematic analyses, but also allows for the production of realistic animations where all aspects of the scenario can be fully controlled.

Methods

Six different scenes (cleaning the kitchen, preparing a greek salad, setting the table, changing the pot of a plant, preparing Sangria, sending a parcel) in a kitchen/dining room scenario were recorded with 4 different pairs of actors. Each scene was recorded 3 times in a natural recording and a high-tech recording. After the actors learned the script and practiced the scene several times, the recordings were started. The recorded scenes are between 2 and 7 minutes long (depending on the scene and the pair of actors).

Natural recording

The scenario was built to look as natural as possible (using furniture, carpets and curtains on the walls). The scenes were recorded with 5 high-definition camcorders from different camera positions.

High-tech recording

The scenes were recorded with 2 high-definition camcorders (overview cameras from 2 corners of the room like in the natural recording). The movement of the 2 persons was captured with 2 XSens MVN motion capture suits. Additionally, the position of the 2 persons was tracked with the Vicon motion capture system, using 2 helmets with tracking markers. Also some objects were tracked with the Vicon motion capture system.

Data access and license

As per EU rules, this data is made available for free to the research community. In order to download it, simply go to Data and download the sequences / data you are interested in. If you use the data in your research, please cite the following paper:
Christian Wallraven, Michael Schultze, Betty Mohler, Argiro Vatakis and Katerina Pastra: "The POETICON enacted scenario corpus - a tool for human and computational experiments on action understanding". The 9th IEEE conference on Authomatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG'11), 2011