Using a Kinect sensor to acquire biological motion: Toolbox and evaluation

Biological motion (BM) is the movement of animate entities, which conveys rich social information. To obtain pure BM, researchers nowadays predominantly use point-light displays (PLDs), which depict BM through a set of light points (e.g., 12 points) placed at distinct joints of a moving human body. Most prevalent BM stimuli are created by state-of-the-art motion capture systems. Although these stimuli are highly precise, the motion capture system is expensive and bulky, and its process of constructing a PLD-based BM is time-consuming and complex. These factors impede the investigation of BM mechanisms. In this study, we propose a free Kinect-based biological motion capture (KBC) toolbox based on the Kinect Sensor 2.0 in C++. The KBC toolbox aims to help researchers acquire PLD-based BM in an easy, low-cost, and user-friendly way. We conducted three experiments to examine whether KBC-generated BM can genuinely reflect the processing characteristics of BM: (1) Is BM from this source processed globally in vision? (2) Does its BM (e.g., from the feet) retain detailed local information? and (3) Does the BM convey emotional information? We obtained positive results in response to all three questions. Therefore, we think that the KBC toolbox can be useful in generating BM for future research.