FORM: A
Kinematic Gesture-Annotation Scheme (Craig Martell)
FORM is a gesture
annotation scheme designed to capture the kinematic information in gesture from videos of
speakers. The FORM project is currently building a detailed database of gesture-annotated videos
stored in Annotation
Graph format. This will allow the gestural information to be augmented with other
linguistic information, like parse-tress of the sentences accompanying the gestures, discourse
structure, intonation information, etc.
FORM encodes the "phonetics" of gesture by giving geometric descriptions of location and movement of the right and left arms and hands, the torso and the head. Other kinematic information like effort and shape are also recorded.
Currently, FORM uses Anvil, but they are developing FORMTool, their own open-sourced gesture annotation tool. This tool will be of use to anyone wanting to encode linguistic information from videos in Annotaiton Graph format.