Multiple description coding of animated meshes

In this paper, we propose three novel multiple description coding (MDC) methods for reliable transmission of compressed animated meshes represented by series of 3D static meshes with same connectivity. The proposed methods trade off reconstruction quality for error resilience to provide the best expected reconstruction of 3D mesh sequence at the decoder side. The methods are based on layer duplication and partitioning of the set of vertices of a scalable coded animated mesh by either spatial or temporal subsampling. Each partitioned set is encoded separately to generate independently decodable bit-streams or so-called descriptions. In addition, the proposed MDC methods can achieve varying redundancy allocations by including a number of encoded spatial or temporal layers from the other description. The algorithms are evaluated with redundancy-rate-distortion (RRD) curves and per-frame reconstruction analysis. RRD performances show that vertex partitioning-based MDC performs better at low redundancies for especially spatially dense models. Temporal subsampling-based MDC performs better at moderate redundancies as well as low redundancies for spatially coarse models. Layer duplication-based MDC can achieve the lowest redundancies with flexible redundancy allocation capability and can be designed to achieve the smallest variance of reconstruction quality between consecutive frames. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.