BAP Sparsing: A Novel Approach to MPEG-4 Body Animation Parameter Compression

The MPEG-4 standard includes support not only for natural video and audio, but also for synthetic graphics and sounds. In the MPEG-4 specifications, Body Animation Parameters (BAPs) and Body Definition Parameters (BDPs) allow virtual bodies and their animation to be compressed using a standard compression pipeline comprising of quantization, predictive encoding and arithmetic coding of these parameters. In this paper, we propose and implement a new stage within the standard prediction-based compression pipeline for the BAPs, termed as BAP sparsing. BAP sparsing compresses a complete block of motion data, consisting of an initial I-frame followed by subsequent P-frames, required for creating the animation. It exploits the inherent hierarchical structure of the human skeletal model to intelligently drop and modify the P-frames, while preserving animation quality. BAP sparsing is shown to result in superior compression of the BAP data, with negligible loss in the motion animation quality...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ICW
• Authors: Siddhartha Chattopadhyay, Suchendra M. Bhandarkar, Kang Li
• Keywords: Animation, BAP Data, BAP Sparsing, Communications, ICW 2005