COBRA: Compression of the Basis for PCA Represented Animations

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, we present an extension of dynamic mesh compression techniques based on PCA. Such representation allows very compact representation of moving 3D surfaces; however, it requires some side information to be transmitted along with the main data. The biggest part of this information is the PCA basis, and since the data can be encoded very efficiently, the size of the basis cannot be neglected when considering the overall performance of a compression algorithm. We present a new work in this area, as none of the papers about PCA based compression really addresses this issue. We will show that for an efficient and accurate encoding there are better choices than even sophisticated algorithms such as LPC. We will present results showing that our approach can reduce the size of the basis by 90% with respect to direct encoding, which can lead to approximately 25% increase of performance of the compression algorithm without any significant loss of accuracy. Such improvement moves the performance of the PCA encoder beyond the performance of current state of the art dynamic mesh compression algorithms, such as the recently adopted MPEG standard, FAMC.