Motion-compensated coding of 3D animation models

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to code the animated three-dimensional (3-D) mesh model. After we classify the mesh frames in the animation model into intra- and inter-meshes, each mesh frame is decomposed into linear triangular strips, which in turn are partitioned into several fixed-length segments. The intra-mesh is compressed by differential coding of vertex coordinates. The inter-mesh is motion-compensated segment by segment from the previous meshes and residual errors are transformed by 1-D DCT. The transform coefficients are then entropy coded. We demonstrate that the proposed algorithm yields an improved coding gain than the MPEG-4 SNHC codec.