Face mesh compression based on half-spherical coordinates for home entertainment systems

For a realistic entertainment experience, home entertainment systems require the ability to handle rich and detailed human facial expressions; this consumes huge amounts of storage. We present a progressive octree-based mesh compression framework optimized for human face models in game applications. We define the octree data structure in spherical coordinates (S-Octree) to reduce information entropy for human face models and to utilize the symmetry. Because our approach provides a framework for general spatial partitioning methods, it can be applied to other compression schemes based on octrees for human facial meshes. In comparison with previous methods, our method reduces number of bits around by 50%.