FAMC: The MPEG-4 standard for Animated Mesh Compression

Abstract

This paper presents a new compression technique for 3D dynamic meshes, referred to as FAMC - frame-based animated mesh compression, recently promoted within the MPEG-4 standard as Amendment 2 of part 16 AFX (Animation Framework extension). The heart of the method is a skinning model optimally computed from a frame-based representation and exploited for compression purposes within the framework of a motion compensation strategy. The proposed encoder offers high compression performances (gains in bitrate of 60% with respect to the previous MPEG-4 technique and of 20 to 40% with respect to state-of-the-art approaches) and is well suited for compressing both geometric and photometric attributes.