We describe a compression scheme for the geometry component of 3D animation sequences. This scheme is based on the principle component analysis (PCA) method, which represents the animation sequence using a small number of basis functions. Second-order linear prediction coding (LPC) is applied to the PCA coefficients in order to further reduce the code size by exploiting the temporal coherence present in the sequence. Our results show that applying LPC to the PCA scheme results in significant performance improvements relative to other coding methods. The use of these codes will make animated 3D data more accessible for graphics and visualization applications. r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.