DMAT: Deformable Medial Axis Transform for Animated Mesh Approximation

Abstract

Extracting a faithful and compact representation of an animated surface mesh is an important problem for computer graphics. However, the surface-based methods have limited approximation power for volume preservation when the animated sequences are extremely simplified. In this paper, we introduce Deformable Medial Axis Transform (DMAT), which is deformable medial mesh composed of a set of animated spheres. Starting from extracting an accurate and compact representation of a static MAT as the template and partitioning the vertices on the input surface as the correspondences for each medial primitive, we present a correspondence-based approximation method equipped with an As-Rigid-As-Possible (ARAP) deformation energy defined on medial primitives. As a result, our algorithm produces DMAT with consistent connectivity across the whole sequence, accurately approximating the input animated surfaces.