Virtual character animation mapping

In this paper, a novel encoding scheme for virtual character animation (VCA) is proposed. By representing each segment of motion information of a skeletal avatar as an image map, temporal coherence presented within the joints sequences of the VCA can now be exploited as spatial redundancies within an image using conventional image processing tools and standards to achieve efficient compression for the character animation sequences. Simulation results demonstrated that the proposed scheme achieve competitive rate-distortion performance compare to previously proposed SVCA scheme for virtual character animation sequences. The proposed scheme is suitable for providing VCA to low powered mobile devices requiring small data size while maintaining satisfactory visual quality at the client side.