We investigate dynamical models of human motion that can
support both synthesis and analysis tasks. Unlike coarser
discriminative models that work well when action classes are
nicely separated, we seek models that have fine-scale
representational power and can therefore model subtle
differences in the way an action is performed.
To this end, we model an observed action as an (unknown) linear
time-invariant dynamical model of relatively small order,
driven by a sparse bounded input signal.
Our motivating intuition is that the time-invariant
dynamics will capture the unchanging physical characteristics
of an actor, while the inputs used to excite the system
will correspond to a causal signature of the action
being performed. We show that our model has sufficient representational power
to closely approximate large classes of non-stationary actions
with significantly reduced complexity.
We also show that temporal statistics of the inferred
input sequences can be...