Volume Tracking Based Reference Mesh Extraction for Time-Varying Mesh Compression

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel volume tracking method to extract reference meshes from time-varying meshes, reducing storage and transmission costs while enabling applications like shape deformation and surface correspondence.

Contribution

The proposed approach employs ARAP volume tracking and multidimensional scaling to extract reference meshes that capture essential shape information of TVMs.

Findings

Effective extraction of reference meshes for TVMs

Reduces storage and transmission costs

Enables shape deformation and correspondence

Abstract

Time-Varying meshes (TVMs), characterized by their varying connectivity and number of vertices, hold significant potential in immersive media and other various applications. However, their practical utilization is challenging due to their time-varying features and large file sizes. Creating a reference mesh that contains the most essential information is a promising approach to utilizing shared information within TVMs to reduce storage and transmission costs. We propose a novel method that employs volume tracking to extract reference meshes. First, we adopt as-rigid-as-possible (ARAP) volume tracking on TVMs to get the volume centers for each mesh. Then, we use multidimensional scaling (MDS) to get reference centers that ensure the reference mesh avoids self-contact regions. Finally, we map the vertices of the meshes to reference centers and extract the reference mesh. Our approach offers a feasible solution for extracting reference meshes that can serve multiple purposes such as establishing surface correspondence, deforming the reference mesh to different shapes for I-frame based mesh compression, or defining the global shape of the TVMs.