%0 Journal Article
%T A Compact Representation for 3D Animation Using Octrees and Affine Transformations
%A Youyou Wang
%A Guilherme N. DeSouza
%J International Journal of Digital Multimedia Broadcasting
%D 2010
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2010/924091
%X This paper presents a new and compact 3D representation for nonrigid objects using the motion vectors between two consecutive frames. Our method relies on an Octree to recursively partition the object into smaller parts. Each part is then assigned a small number of motion parameters that can accurately represent that portion of the object. Finally, an adaptive thresholding, a singular value decomposition for dealing with singularities, and a quantization and arithmetic coding further enhance our proposed method by increasing the compression while maintaining very good signal-noise ratio. Compared to other methods that use tri-linear interpolation, Principle Component Analysis (PCA), or non-rigid partitioning (e.g., FAMC) our algorithm combines the best attributes in most of them. For example, it can be carried out on a frame-to-frame basis, rather than over long sequences, but it is also much easier to compute. In fact, we demonstrate a computation complexity of for our method, while some of these methods can reach complexities of and worse. Finally, as the result section demonstrates, the proposed improvements do not sacrifice performance since our method has a better or at least very similar performance in terms of compression ratio and PSNR. 1. Introduction As the technology for graphics processing advances, so does the details in the 3D models used for animation. So, despite these advances, when storing, transmitting, or rendering such models, the need for fast and compact representations is the same as it was a few years ago. In that sense, two categories of systems can be found in the literature: the time-independent methods and the time-dependent methods. The first and most traditional category is the time-independent, and it was first introduced in [1]. In that case, a 3D object is represented using its geometric properties at that moment. That is, 3D points [2, 3], triangular meshes, surface normals, edge orientations [4¨C7], wavelet coefficients [8, 9], and other features of the object are analyzed within a single time instant, or frame. These methods have advantages in terms of the quality of the model, but they are of course not very compact. On the other hand, time-dependent methods exploit the temporal relationship of these same types of features in order to increase compression. In one of the first systems to be reported [10], but also in more recent ones [11¨C15], the basic idea is to encode the motion of the 3D object. That is, the difference between consecutive frames, rather than the properties of the object in the frames. In order to
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijdmb/2010/924091/