Model-based compression for synthetic animations

As heterogenous computing environments become ubiquitous, the demand for viewing synthetic 3D animations across a wide variety of platforms is increasing. In this paper we present the framework of a compression system for synthetic animations which can be used to view such animations in these environments. While the system is flexible enough to take advantage of any rendering capabilities that may be available at the decoder, it is designed with the intention of viewing such animations on low end computers or set top boxes that may not contain rendering hardware. Our approach takes advantage of the information generated during rendering to guide the compression of it. Our model-based approach to compression for synthetic animations is faster and produces better quality as well as higher compression rates than video compression algorithms, while maintaining the portability of a cheap software based solution. Compressing animations using our system results in both a 25-50% lower bitrate and a 1.5-3.0 dB higher PSNR than using MPEG