Bit allocation of vertices and colors for patch-based coding in time-varying meshes

This paper discusses bit-rate assignments for vertices, color, reference frames, and target frames in the patch-based compression method for time-varying meshes (TVMs). TVMs are nonisomorphic 3D mesh sequences of the real-world objects generated from multiview images. Experimental results demonstrate that the bit rate for vertices greatly affects the visual quality of the rendered 3D model, whereas the bit rate for color does not contribute to quality improvement. Therefore, as many bits as possible should be assigned to vertices, with 8–10 bits per vertex (bpv) per frame being sufficient for color. For interframe coding, the visual quality is improved in proportion to the bit rate of both vertices and color. However, it is demonstrated that the use of fewer bits (5∼6 bpv) is sufficient to achieve a visual quality that matches the intraframe visual quality.