FAMC: The MPEG-4 standard for Animated Mesh Compression

Abstract

This paper presents a new compression technique for 3D dynamic meshes, referred to as FAMC -Frame-based Animated Mesh Compression, recently promoted within the MPEG-4 standard as Amendement 2 of part 16 AFX (Animation Framework eXtension). The heart of the method is a skinning model optimally computed from a frame-based representation and exploited for compression purposes within the framework of a motion compensation strategy. The proposed encoder offers high compression performances (gains in bitrate of 60% with respect to the previous MPEG-4 technique and of 20 to 40% with respect to state-of-the-art approahes) and is well suited for compressing both geometric and photometric attributes.

Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Point Cloud Codec for Tele-Immersive Video

“…While these methods are promising, it seems that methods based on 3D Point clouds can result in coding with even less overhead and more flexible progressive rendering capabilities, as the format is simpler to acquire and process. Last, there have been methods defined in the international standards for mesh compression [18] [19] which is greatly beneficial for interoperability between devices and services. These methods have been mostly designed for remote rendering, and have low decoder complexity and a slightly higher encoder complexity; In 3D immersive and augmented 3D Video coding, having both low encoder and decoder complexity are important (analogous to video coding in video conferencing systems compared to video on demand).…”

Source coding for transmission of reconstructed dynamic geometry: a rate-distortion-complexity analysis of different approaches

“…The standard is the latest addition to MPEG-4 part 16 [7], that was developed to compress synthetic animation. It is also currently the state of art codec for compression of mesh animations in terms of performance [8].…”

“…It has been important enough that specific ISO standards have been developed in the MPEG working group such as TFAN [6] and SVA [7] for static mesh objects and AFX FAMC [8] for animations representing meshes with a fixed connectivity and time varying geometry. These technologies are currently part of the MPEG-4 standard, and have been introduced fairly recently, superseding previous mesh codecs in MPEG-4, that did not address specific requirements such as fast decoding and an efficient handling of non-manifolds mesh models.…”

“…The FAMC Coder codes animations in 4 steps (for more details see [8]). First skinning based motion compensation is applied, which is a form of motion compensation that segments the mesh in clusters that can be tracked for their motion (which is accurately described by an affine transform).…”

“…FAMC [8] is a standardized technology for compression of mesh based animations, that are mesh sequences based on key-frames where only the vertex positions change. The standard is the latest addition to MPEG-4 part 16 [7], that was developed to compress synthetic animation.…”