Automatic Mesh Animation Preview With User Voting-Based Refinement

With the rapid growth in the number and quality of mesh animations, browsing mesh animations wastes considerable bandwidth and requires tremendous rendering resources. Accordingly, the preview technique, which provides users a rapid understanding of a mesh animation before downloading, has received increasing attention. In this paper, we propose an automatic mesh animation preview method that incorporates the interframe motion saliency, intraframe surface saliency, user preference, and camera smoothness constraint to formulate the viewpoint selection as a minimization problem. Then, the minimization is solved by finding the shortest path, and the viewpoints for mesh animation preview are generated accordingly. A voting mechanism is introduced into this process to collect user feedbacks and periodically use user voting feedbacks to refine the preview camera path. The experiment results show that our mesh preview method helps users acquire a good understanding of animation contents. A user study demonstrates that our preview results are superior to those generated by typical preview methods in terms of the subjective visual quality.