Blendshape Compression Techniques and Their Impact on Reconstructed Avatar Face Animation: A Subjective Study

Blendshapes have been widely adopted as a key method for generating facial animation on avatars due to their ease of manipulation, flexibility in capturing diverse facial expressions, and compatibility with real-time rendering. However, current frameworks lack efficient methods for compressing blendshape (BS) animation parameters, which are critical for optimizing data transmission. This study introduces a pioneer compression scheme leveraging the amount of BS to be transmitted, their quantization as well as their transmission frequency. Subjective evaluation using the ITU-R BT.500-15 recommendation demonstrates that the proposed method significantly reduces the amount of data to transmit while preserving acceptable visual quality. This approach extends prior findings on reduced BS sets[kang2023effects] and addresses a significant gap in avatar media coding[avril2023morgan]. This work establishes a baseline for efficient facial animation and, serves as a foundation for further exploration on adaptive rate-allocation strategies and advanced compression strategies tailored for diverse avatar animation scenarios.