Describing movement learning using metric learning.

Analysing movement learning can rely on human evaluation, e.g. annotating video recordings, or on computing means in applying metrics on behavioural data. However, it remains challenging to relate human perception of movement similarity to computational measures that aim at modelling such similarity. In this paper, we propose a metric learning method bridging the gap between human ratings of movement similarity in a motor learning task and computational metric evaluation on the same task. It applies metric learning on a Dynamic Time Warping algorithm to derive an optimal set of movement features that best explain human ratings. We evaluated this method on an existing movement dataset, which comprises videos of participants practising a complex gesture sequence toward a target template, as well as the collected data that describes the movements. We show that it is possible to establish a linear relationship between human ratings and our learned computational metric. This learned metric can be used to describe the most salient temporal moments implicitly used by annotators, as well as movement parameters that correlate with motor improvements in the dataset. We conclude with possibilities to generalise this method for designing computational tools dedicated to movement annotation and evaluation of skill learning.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2023 Loriette et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)