TVMC: Time-Varying Mesh Compression via Multi-Stage Anchor Mesh Generation

TL;DR

TVMC introduces a multi-stage anchor mesh framework for efficient compression of time-varying meshes, significantly reducing data size while maintaining high geometric fidelity in dynamic 3D sequences.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel hierarchical anchor mesh generation method combining topology alignment, Kalman filtering, and quadric refinement for improved dynamic mesh compression.

Findings

Achieves 10.2% to 16.9% BD-rate gain over V-DMC standard.

Preserves high surface quality with reduced data size.

Demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on MPEG sequences.

Abstract

Time-varying meshes, characterized by dynamic connectivity and varying vertex counts, hold significant promise for applications such as augmented reality. However, their practical utilization remains challenging due to the substantial data volume required for high-fidelity representation. While various compression methods attempt to leverage temporal redundancy between consecutive mesh frames, most struggle with topological inconsistency and motion-induced artifacts. To address these issues, we propose Time-Varying Mesh Compression (TVMC), a novel framework built on multi-stage coarse-to-fine anchor mesh generation for inter-frame prediction. Specifically, the anchor mesh is progressively constructed in three stages: initial, coarse, and fine. The initial anchor mesh is obtained through fast topology alignment to exploit temporal coherence. A Kalman filter-based motion estimation module then generates a coarse anchor mesh by accurately compensating inter-frame motions. Subsequently, a Quadric Error Metric-based refinement step optimizes vertex positions to form a fine anchor mesh with improved geometric fidelity. Based on the refined anchor mesh, the inter-frame motions relative to the reference base mesh are encoded, while the residual displacements between the subdivided fine anchor mesh and the input mesh are adaptively quantized and compressed. This hierarchical strategy preserves consistent connectivity and high-quality surface approximation, while achieving an efficient and compact representation of dynamic geometry. Extensive experiments on standard MPEG dynamic mesh sequences demonstrate that TVMC achieves state-of-the-art compression performance. Compared to the latest V-DMC standard, it delivers a significant BD-rate gain of 10.2% ~ 16.9%, while preserving high reconstruction quality. The code is available at https://github.com/H-Huang774/TVMC.