Single-rate near lossless compression of animated geometry

Representing mesh geometry in local rather than the world coordinate systems is very useful in many 3D animation processing applications. One can investigate the representation of vertex locations relative to a local coordinate frame (LCF) in the compression of dynamic 3D meshes. Unlike the world coordinates, which scatter in a wide range and show non-linear behavior of the vertices, the local coordinates exhibit a large clustering behavior of the vertex over time. This property is very useful for exploiting a large coherence over the vertex trajectory and between neighboring vertices. In this paper, we discuss the use of the LCF in static and animated mesh encoding and we introduce a new connectivity-guided predictive scheme for single-rate compression for animated meshes. The proposed geometry encoding strategy is based on a region growing encoding order, and only the differences between original and predicted locations are encoded in a local coordinate system, which splits into two tangential and one normal components. The approach is simple, efficient, and well-suited for real time applications.