Model-Based Power Aware Compression Algorithms for MPEG-4 Virtual Human Animation in Mobile Environments

MPEG-4 body animation parameters (BAP) are used for animation of MPEG-4 compliant virtual human-like characters. Distributed virtual reality applications and networked games on mobile computers require access to locally stored or streamed compressed BAP data. Existing MPEG-4 BAP compression techniques are inefficient for streaming, or storing, BAP data on mobile computers, because: 1) MPEG-4 compressed BAP data entails a significant number of CPU cycles, hence significant, unacceptable power consumption, for the purpose of decompression, 2) the lossy MPEG-4 technique of frame dropping to reduce network throughput during streaming leads to unacceptable animation degradation, and 3) lossy MPEG-4 compression does not exploit structural information in the virtual human model. In this article, we propose two novel algorithms for lossy compression of BAP data, termed as BAP-Indexing and BAP-Sparsing. We demonstrate how an efficient combination of the two algorithms results in a lower network bandwidth requirement and reduced power for data decompression at the client end when compared to MPEG-4 compression. The algorithm exploits the structural information in the virtual human model, thus maintaining visually acceptable quality of the resulting animation upon decompression. Consequently, the hybrid algorithm for BAP data compression is ideal for streaming of motion animation data to power- and network-constrained mobile computers