Online MoCap Data Coding With Bit Allocation, Rate Control, and Motion-Adaptive Post-Processing

With the advancements in methods for capturing 3D object motion, motion capture (MoCap) data are starting to be used beyond their traditional realm of animation and gaming in areas such as the arts, rehabilitation, automotive industry, remote interactions, and so on. As the amount of MoCap data increase, compression becomes crucial for further expansion and adoption of these technologies. In this paper, we extend our previous work on low-delay MoCap data compression by introducing two improvements. The first improvement is the bit allocation to long-term and short-term reference MoCap frames, which provides a 10–15% reduction in coded bit rate at the same quality. The second improvement is the post-processing in the form of motion-adaptive temporal low-pass filtering, which is able to provide another 9–13% savings in the bit rate. The experimental results also indicate that the proposed online MoCap codec is competitive with several state-of-the-art offline codecs. Overall, the proposed techniques integrate into a highly effective online MoCap codec that is suitable for low-delay applications, whose implementation is provided alongside this paper to aid further research in the field.