Geometry compression for time-varying meshes using coarse and fine levels of quantization and run-length encoding

Time-varying meshes (TVM) is a new 3-D scene representation which are generated from multiple cameras. It captures highly detailed shape and texture as well as movement of real-world moving objects. Compression is a key technology for supporting TVM applications such as education, interactive broadcasting, and intangible heritage archiving. Previous works focused on compression of 3-D animation that has the same topology throughout the entire sequences. Unfortunately, the topology of TVMs change with time which makes it difficult to compress TVMs. In this paper, we propose a geometry encoder for TVMs. The encoder finds spatial and temporal redundancy by coarse and fine level quantization. Thereafter, vertex information is converted into binary sequences. And then, the binary sequences are encoded using run-length encoding (RLE). Experimental results show that vertices of TVMs which require 96 bits per vertex (bpv) are compressed to 1.9-15.4 bpv while maintaining a small geometric distortion ranging from 0.7 times 10^-4 to 1.3 times 10^-3 % of the maximum error.