Progressive coding for QoS-enabled streaming of dynamic 3-D meshes

We introduce a new compressed representation for the geometry of dynamic polygonal 3-D meshes, suitable for streaming rate-controlled 3-D animations with fine-grained adaptation to the available network transmission rates. The new representation is based on both mesh simplification and dynamic geometry compression methods. This is in contrast to all other simplification algorithms reported to date, which are tailored to static meshes, whose vertex positions do not vary with time. Furthermore, recently reported methods for compressing dynamic meshes do not encode geometry in a progressive manner. In this work, we lay the foundations of progressive encoding of dynamic 3-D meshes, by formally expressing such models and their associated sequences of topological operations. We also propose a rate adaptation scheme for animated meshes, based on vertex pair candidate contractions and vertex splits, and show its efficiency compared to a typical quantisation-based approach.