Zerotree Coding of Subdivision Wavelet Coefficients in Dynamic
Time-Varying Meshes
Abstract
We propose a complete system to enable progressive coding with quality
scalability of the mesh geometry, in MPEGâ\euro™s state-of-the-art
Video-based Dynamic Mesh Coding (V-DMC) framework. In particular, we
propose an alternative method for encoding the subdivision wavelet
coefficients in V-DMC, using a mesh-based zerotree coding approach. The
proposed method works directly in the native 3D mesh space. It allows us
to identify parent-child relationships amongst the wavelet coefficients
across different subdivision levels, which can be used to achieve an
efficient and versatile coding mechanism. We demonstrate that, given a
starting base mesh, a target subdivision surface and a desired maximum
number of zerotree passes, our system produces an elegant and visually
attractive lossy-to-lossless mesh geometry reconstruction with no
further user intervention. Moreover, lossless coefficient encoding with
our approach is shown to require almost the same bitrate as the default
displacement coding methods in V-DMC. Yet, our approach provides several
levels of quality resolution within each target bitrate, while the
current solutions encode a single quality level only. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the first time that a zerotree-based method has been
proposed and demonstrated to work for the compression of dynamic
time-varying meshes, and the first time that an embedded
quality-scalable approach has been used in the V-DMC framework.