SPC: Fast and efficient scalable predictive coding of animated meshes

Abstract

Animated meshes are often represented by a sequence of static meshes with constant connectivity. Due to their frame-based representation they usually occupy a vast amount of bandwidth or disk space. We present a fast and efficient scalable predictive coding (SPC) scheme for frame-based representations of animated meshes. SPC decomposes animated meshes in spatial and temporal layers which are efficiently encoded in one pass through the animation. Coding is performed in a streamable and scalable fashion. Dependencies between neighbouring spatial and temporal layers are predictively exploited using the already encoded spatio-temporal neighbourhood. Prediction is performed in the space of rotation-invariant coordinates compensating local rigid motion. SPC supports spatial and temporal scalability, and it enables efficient compression as well as fast encoding and decoding. Parts of SPC were adopted in the MPEG-4 FAMC standard. However, SPC significantly outperforms the streaming mode of FAMC with coding gains of over 33%, while in comparison to the scalable FAMC, SPC achieves coding gains of up to 15%. SPC has the additional advantage over FAMC of achieving real-time encoding and decoding rates while having only low memory requirements. Compared to some other non-scalable state-of-the-art approaches, SPC shows superior compression performance with gains of over 16% in bit-rate. © 2009 The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.