Yesterday, Jeroen Arendsen introduced me to the concept of fidgeting, the stuff that happens in between actions/gestures in a continuous flux of movement. I have been looking for a good word to describe this type of movement (which I have been calling “movement-noise”), and I am happy to finally have a better word for it. I made a small sketch showing how fidgeting fits into my movement-flux diagram to celebrate the new discovery:
Jeroen has conducted some experiments where he has asked people to press a button whenever they see a sign/gesture, and discusses how good people are at removing all the redundant movement information (i.e. fidgeting).
Obviously, for action/gesture recognition systems we are interested in filtering out such movements and be able to focus only on the main movements. This is not so bad when the person is at rest, but in my experience it gets really tricky when the person is moving as well as fidgeting (e.g. a dancer running across a stage).