In the previous months the work has been devoted to the encoding of facial expressions in a coherent, accurate and efficient manner using FACS. After achieving a satisfactory result, then the target of the work has moved to the rest of the body.

During the last two months the work has been focused on obtaining a suitable low-level and compact body pose coding system from a set of body joint positions and rotations. This is the first step towards a more abstract and dynamic body expression coding.

Previously, in the preliminary stage, that is, the capture phase, and specifically for the detection and tracking of the body parts, a Microsoft Kinect camera and the OpenNI/NITE software are being used. This approach is one of the most robust human body part trackers currently available. This human tracker provides the position and rotation of a set of particular body joints, and the connectivity among them, denoted as skeleton. However, and in order to increase future compatibility, we also consider other alternatives for the tracking of the body parts. In order to achieve it, we perform an abstraction of the so called skeleton, to fulfil the H-Anim standard specification, which describes a body skeleton configuration, including a standardized hierarchical structure of joints, with a predefined set of joint names and local and global coordinate system configurations. In this way, the input for our coding system will be a skeleton in the H-Anim standard. Thus, the static body part configurations are encoded as body part postures at each frame, using the coding system presented next.