Spatially and temporally scalable compression of animated 3D meshes with MPEG-4 / FAMC

We introduce an efficient method for scalable compression of animated 3D meshes. The approach consists of a combination of inter-frame motion compensation and layer-wise predictive coding of remaining residuals. It is shown that motion compensated predictive coding can lead to a significant improvement in compression performance upon the current state of the art with gains of over 40%. In addition, the created bit stream is temporally and spatially scalable allowing an adaptation to network transfer rates and end-user devices. This compression method is currently standardized within MPEG as part of MPEG-4 AFX Amd. 2, where it is referred to as FAMC - Frame-based Animated Mesh Compression.