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

2025-10-26

AI Summary

To address the high compression difficulty of time-varying meshes caused by dynamic topology changes and varying vertex counts—and to overcome limitations of existing methods in handling topological inconsistencies and motion artifacts—this paper proposes a multi-stage anchor mesh generation framework. First, an initial anchor mesh is constructed via fast topology alignment. Subsequently, coarse-to-fine anchor meshes are progressively generated by integrating Kalman filter–based motion estimation with quadric error metric optimization. Finally, adaptive quantization and residual coding are introduced to enhance inter-frame prediction accuracy. Evaluated on MPEG standard test sequences, the method achieves 10.2%–16.9% BD-rate savings over V-DMC, with显著 improvements in reconstruction fidelity. The implementation is publicly available.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Motion & Tracking
• Machine Learning: Deep Generative Models & Autoencoders
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan Repair

Application Category

• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: On-Device user modeling, personalization, and recommendation
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications

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.

Problem

• Compresses time-varying meshes with dynamic connectivity and vertex counts
• Addresses topological inconsistency and motion artifacts in mesh compression
• Achieves efficient representation while preserving high reconstruction quality

Innovation

• Multi-stage anchor mesh generation for inter-frame prediction
• Kalman filter-based motion estimation for coarse anchor mesh
• Quadric Error Metric refinement for fine anchor mesh optimization