Thinning Mesh Animations
Tim Winkler, Barbara Hammer · 2008
Three-dimensional animation sequences are often represented by a discrete set of compatible trian-gle meshes. In order to create the illusion of a smooth motion, a sequence usually consists of a large number of frames. We propose a pre-processing algorithm that considerably reduces the number of frames required to describe the whole animation. Our method is based on Batch Neural Gas [11], a new clustering and classification approach that can be used to automatically find the most rel-evant frames from the sequence. The meshes from the original sequence can then be expressed as linear combinations of these few key-frames with small approximation error. The key-frames can finally be compressed with any state-of-the-art compression scheme. Overall, this leads to improved compression rates as the number of key-frames is significantly smaller than the number of original frames and the storage overhead for the reconstruction weights is marginal. 1