Compression of complex animated meshes

We introduce a new compression algorithm for complex animated meshes of constant connectivity based on the local principal component analysis. The algorithm segments the animated mesh into segments using a region growing algorithm and transforms the original vertex coordinates into the local coordinate frame of their segment. This transformation leads to a strong clustering behavior of vertices and makes each region invariant to any deformation over time. Then each segment is efficiently encoded using the principal component analysis. The set of basis vectors and coefficients corresponding to each segment are quantized and entropy encoded. Experimental results show that our algorithm yields a significant improvement upon some current coders.