MESHGRID - a compact, multi-scalable and animation-friendly surface representation

MESHGRID is a novel, compact, multi-scalable and animation-friendly surface representation method, which has been introduced in MPEG-4. The MESHGRID representation attaches a description of the "global connectivity" between the vertices on the object\´s surface (i.e. the 3D connectivity wireframe) to a regular 3D grid of points (i.e. the reference-grid). The 3D connectivity wireframe is efficiently encoded by using a new type of 3D extension of Freeman chain-code. MESHGRID does not explicitly store the polygons of the surface, since the 3D connectivity wireframe has particular connectivity properties allowing for the unambiguous derivation of the triangulation. The reference-grid is a smooth vector field defined on a regular discrete 3D space. This grid is efficiently compressed by using an embedded 3D wavelet-based multi-resolution intra-band coding algorithm. MESHGRID allows for three types of scalability in both view-dependent and view-independent scenarios: resolution scalability, shape precision, and vertex position scalability. Furthermore, in addition to the classical vertex-based animation, MESHGRID supports specific animation capabilities, such as rippling effects and reshaping on a hierarchical basis of the regular reference-grid and its attached vertices.