Heads up!: biomechanical modeling and neuromuscular control of the neck

ABSTRACT

Unlike the human face, the neck has been largely overlooked in the computer graphics literature, this despite its complex anatomical structure and the important role that it plays in supporting the head in balance while generating the controlled head movements that are essential to so many aspects of human behavior. This paper makes two major contributions. First, we introduce a biomechanical model of the human head-neck system. Emulating the relevant anatomy, our model is characterized by appropriate kinematic redundancy (7 cervical vertebrae coupled by 3-DOF joints) and muscle actuator redundancy (72 neck muscles arranged in 3 muscle layers). This anatomically consistent biomechanical model confronts us with a challenging motor control problem, even for the relatively simple task of balancing the mass of the head in gravity atop the cervical spine. Hence, our second contribution is a novel neuromuscular control model for human head animation that emulates the relevant biological motor control mechanisms. Incorporating low-level reflex and high-level voluntary sub-controllers, our hierarchical controller provides input motor signals to the numerous muscle actuators. In addition to head pose and movement, it controls the tone of mutually opposed neck muscles to regulate the stiffness of the head-neck multibody system. Employing machine learning techniques, the neural networks within our neuromuscular controller are trained offline to efficiently generate the online pose and tone control signals necessary to synthesize a variety of autonomous movements for the behavioral animation of the human head and face.

REFERENCES

• 1: Irene Albrecht , Jörg Haber , Hans-Peter Seidel, Construction and animation of anatomically based human hand models, Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics symposium on Computer animation, July 26-27, 2003, San Diego, California
• 2: Anderson, F., and Pandy, M. 2001. Static and dynamic optimization solutions for gait are practically equivalent. Journal of Biomechanics 34, 153--161.
• 3: Carpenter, R. 1988. Movements of the Eyes, 2nd ed. Pion, London.
• 4: David T. Chen , David Zeltzer, Pump it up: computer animation of a biomechanically based model of muscle using the finite element method, Proceedings of the 19th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.89-98, July 1992
• 5: Delp, S., and Loan, J. 1995. A software system to develop and analyze models of musculoskeletal structures. Computers in Biology and Medicine 25, 21--34.
• 6: Petros Faloutsos , Michiel van de Panne , Demetri Terzopoulos, Composable controllers for physics-based character animation, Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.251-260, August 2001 [doi>10.1145/383259.383287]
• 7: Radek Grzeszczuk , Demetri Terzopoulos, Automated learning of muscle-actuated locomotion through control abstraction, Proceedings of the 22nd annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.63-70, September 1995 [doi>10.1145/218380.218411]
• 8: Radek Grzeszczuk , Demetri Terzopoulos , Geoffrey Hinton, NeuroAnimator: fast neural network emulation and control of physics-based models, Proceedings of the 25th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.9-20, July 1998 [doi>10.1145/280814.280816]
• 9: Hay, J., and Reid, J. 1988. Anatomy, Mechanics, and Human Motion, 2nd ed. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
• 10: Jessica K. Hodgins , Wayne L. Wooten , David C. Brogan , James F. O'Brien, Animating human athletics, Proceedings of the 22nd annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.71-78, September 1995 [doi>10.1145/218380.218414]
• 11: Hogan, N. 1984. Adaptive control of mechanical impedance by coactivation of antagonist muscles. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control AC-29 (Aug.), 681--690.
• 12: G. Irving , J. Teran , R. Fedkiw, Invertible finite elements for robust simulation of large deformation, Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics symposium on Computer animation, August 27-29, 2004, Grenoble, France [doi>10.1145/1028523.1028541]
• 13: Kolja Kähler , Jörg Haber , Hans-Peter Seidel, Geometry-based muscle modeling for facial animation, No description on Graphics interface 2001, p.37-46, June 07-09, 2001, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
• 14: Kandel, E., Schwartz, J., and Jessell, T. 2000. Principles of Neural Science, 4th ed. McGraw Hill, New York.
• 15: Kapandji, I. 1974. The Physiology of the Joints. Vol. 3: The Trunk and the Vertebral Column. Churchill Livingstone, Edinburgh.
• 16: Kawato, M., Furukawa, K., and Suzuki, R. 1987. A hierarchical neural network model for control and learning of voluntary movement. Biological Cybernetics 57, 169--185.
• 17: Keshner, E., and Peterson, B. 1995. Mechanisms controlling human head stabilization. I. Head-neck dynamics during random rotations in the horizontal plane. Journal of Neurophysiology 73, 2293--2301.
• 18: Kim, J., and Hemami, H. 1998. Coordinated three-dimensional motion of the head and torso by dynamic neural networks. IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. B 5, 653--666.
• 19: Komura, T., Shinagawa, Y., and Kunii, T. L. 1997. A muscle-based feed-forward controller of the human body. Computer Graphics Forum 16, 3 (Aug.), 165--176.
• 20: Komura, T., Shinagawa, Y., and Kunii, T. L. 2000. Creating and retargeting motion by the musculoskeletal human body model. The Visual Computer 16, 5, 254--270.
• 21: Yuencheng Lee , Demetri Terzopoulos , Keith Walters, Realistic modeling for facial animation, Proceedings of the 22nd annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.55-62, September 1995 [doi>10.1145/218380.218407]
• 22: Gary Monheit , Norman I. Badler, A Kinematic Model of the Human Spine and Torso, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, v.11 n.2, p.29-38, March 1991 [doi>10.1109/38.75588]
• 23: Michael Neff , Eugene Fiume, Modeling tension and relaxation for computer animation, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics symposium on Computer animation, July 21-22, 2002, San Antonio, Texas [doi>10.1145/545261.545275]
• 24: Victor Ng-Thow-Hing , Eugene Fiume, Anatomically-based models for physical and geometric reconstruction of humans and other animals, 2001
• 25: Pai, D. K., Sueda, S., and Wei, Q. 2005. Fast physically based musculoskeletal simulation. In Proceedings of Sketches & Applications of ACM SIGGRAPH 2005.
• 26: Ferdi Scheepers , Richard E. Parent , Wayne E. Carlson , Stephen F. May, Anatomy-based modeling of the human musculature, Proceedings of the 24th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.163-172, August 1997 [doi>10.1145/258734.258827]
• 27: Eftychios Sifakis , Igor Neverov , Ronald Fedkiw, Automatic determination of facial muscle activations from sparse motion capture marker data, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), v.24 n.3, July 2005
• 28: Spellucci, P. Donlp2. www.netlib.org/ampl/solvers/donlp2/.
• 29: Terzopoulos, D., and Lee, Y. 2004. Behavioral animation of faces. In Facial Modeling and Animation, J. Haber and D. Terzopoulos, Eds., vol. 60 of ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 Course Notes. ACM SIGGRAPH, Aug., 119--128.
• 30: Winnie Tsang , Karan Singh , Eugene Fiume, Helping hand: an anatomically accurate inverse dynamics solution for unconstrained hand motion, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics symposium on Computer animation, July 29-31, 2005, Los Angeles, California [doi>10.1145/1073368.1073414]
• 31: Xiaoyuan Tu , Demetri Terzopoulos, Artificial fishes: physics, locomotion, perception, behavior, Proceedings of the 21st annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.43-50, July 1994 [doi>10.1145/192161.192170]
• 32: Vasavada, A., Li, S., and Delp, S. 1998. Influence of muscle morphometry and moment arms on the moment-generating capacity of human neck muscles. Spine 23, 412--422.
• 33: Warfel, J. 1985. The Head, Neck, and Trunk, 5 ed. Lea & Febiger, Philadelphia.
• 34: Jane Wilhelms , Allen Van Gelder, Anatomically based modeling, Proceedings of the 24th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.173-180, August 1997 [doi>10.1145/258734.258833]
• 35: Winters, J., and Crago, P., Eds. 2000. Biomechanics and Neural Control of Posture and Movement. Springer-Verlag, New York.
• 36: Yamazaki, Y., Ohkuwa, T., Itoh, H., and Suzuki, M. 1994. Reciprocal activation and coactivation in antagonistic muscles during rapid goal-directed movements. Brain Research Bulletin 34, 587--593.
• 37: KangKang Yin , Michael B. Cline , Dinesh K. Pai, Motion Perturbation Based on Simple Neuromotor Control Models, Proceedings of the 11th Pacific Conference on Computer Graphics and Applications, p.445, October 08-10, 2003
• 38: Victor Brian Zordan , Bhrigu Celly , Bill Chiu , Paul C. DiLorenzo, Breathe easy: model and control of simulated respiration for animation, Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics symposium on Computer animation, August 27-29, 2004, Grenoble, France [doi>10.1145/1028523.1028528]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.7 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism
          Subjects: Animation

Keywords:
biomechanical modeling, facial animation, hierarchical neuromuscular control, neck animation, neural network learning