Multi-chart geometry video: A compact representation for 3D animations

This paper introduces a new compression scheme, so-called Multi-Chart Geometry Video (MCGV), for 3D dynamic meshes with constant connectivity and time-varying geometry. The core of the proposed method is a piecewise affine predictor coupled with a Multi-Chart Geometry IMage (MCGIM) representation of the residual errors. The mesh is first partitioned into vertex clusters whose motion can be accurately described by a unique 3D affine transform. The prediction errors are represented as MCGIMs which are compressed by using standardized image encoders such as JPEG and MPEG-4. The performances of our encoder are objectively evaluated on a data set of six animation sequences with various sizes, geometries and topologies, and exhibiting both rigid and elastic motions. The experimental evaluation shows that the proposed MCGV achieves up to 60% lower compression distortions than the geometry video approach, while outperforming (with 30% to 94% lower distortions) the RT, MPEG-4/ AFX-IC, D3DMC, PCA and Dynapack techniques.