Compressing Dynamic Meshes with Geometric Laplacians

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of representing dynamic 3D meshes in a compact way, so that they can be stored and transmitted efficiently. We focus on sequences of triangle meshes with shared connectivity, avoiding the necessity of having a skinning structure. Our method first computes an average mesh of the whole sequence in edge shape space. A discrete geometric Laplacian of this average surface is then used to encode the coefficients that describe the trajectories of the mesh vertices. Optionally, a novel spatio-temporal predictor may be applied to the trajectories to further improve the compression rate. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms the current state of the art in terms of low data rate at a given perceived distortion, as measured by the STED and KG error metrics.