Temporal wavelet-based compression for 3D animated models

We present an efficient compression scheme for animated sequences of triangular meshes of the same connectivity. The proposed algorithm exploits the temporal coherence of the geometry component by using a temporal wavelet filtering. The quantization of the resulting wavelet coefficients is then optimized by a bit allocation process. This process dispatches the bit budget across the coefficient subbands according to their influence on the quality of the reconstructed sequence for one specific user-given bitrate. The proposed scheme is simple, fast, flexible, and scalable in frame rate and bitrate. Moreover, simulation results show that our approach is competitive for any kind of animated models, whatever the characteristics (parametrically coherent or not, fine/coarse meshes...), contrary to the related works. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.