  Generative models of 3D human motion are often restricted to a small number
of activities and can therefore not generalize well to novel movements or
applications. In this work we propose a deep learning framework for human
motion capture data that learns a generic representation from a large corpus of
motion capture data and generalizes well to new, unseen, motions. Using an
encoding-decoding network that learns to predict future 3D poses from the most
recent past, we extract a feature representation of human motion. Most work on
deep learning for sequence prediction focuses on video and speech. Since
skeletal data has a different structure, we present and evaluate different
network architectures that make different assumptions about time dependencies
and limb correlations. To quantify the learned features, we use the output of
different layers for action classification and visualize the receptive fields
of the network units. Our method outperforms the recent state of the art in
skeletal motion prediction even though these use action specific training data.
Our results show that deep feedforward networks, trained from a generic mocap
database, can successfully be used for feature extraction from human motion
data and that this representation can be used as a foundation for
classification and prediction.
