A Rigid Transform Basis for Animation Compression and Level of Detail

We present a scheme for achieving level of detail and compression for animation sequences with known constant connectivity. We suggest compression is useful to automatically create low levels of detail in animations which may be more compressed than the original animation parameters and for high levels of detail where the original animation is expensive to compute. Our scheme is based on spatial segmentation of a base mesh into rigidly transforming segments and then temporal aggregation of these transformations. The result will approximate the given animation within a user specified tolerance which can be adjusted to give the required level of detail. A spatio-temporal smoothing algorithm is used on decoding to give acceptable animations. We show that the rigid transformation basis will span the space of all animations. We also show that the algorithm will converge to the specified tolerance. The algorithm is applied to several examples of synthetic animation and rate distortion curves are given which show that in some cases, the scheme outperforms current compressors.