Context-adaptive binary arithmetic coding for frame-based animated mesh compression

Context-based adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) has proven to be an efficient technique in the area of video coding. This paper presents an approach for integrating CABAC into the framework of frame-based animated mesh compression (FAMC). It presents the specific modifications and adaptations that have been worked out to adapt CABAC to the specific requirements of FAMC in order to build a solution with a higher degree of coding efficiency. For a typical test set of animated meshes, average bit rate savings of 25% have been observed for the combination of CABAC and FAMC when compared to a previous version of FAMC using a conventional N-ary arithmetic coder. The presented approach has been recently adopted as part of the MPEG-4 AFX standard.