Compression of Animation Using 3D Structure Runlength Coding

Abstract

Computer animation is typical of artificial image sequences different from video images. Video compression standards are not well suitable for the artificial images. In order to efficiently compress animation, this paper introduces a novel concept 'three-dimensional structure runlength coding' (briefly 3D SRC), which is based on the two-dimensional structure runlength coding (briefly 2D SRC). The paper presents a basic algorithm of 3D SRC which is expanded simply from 2D SRC. In 3D SRC, the key technique is to compare each pixel of the current frame with its three-dimensional neighbors-a pixel of the previous frame and neighboring pixels of the current frame. The results of the comparison are compressed by runlength coding. Our experimental results show that in compression of animation, the data compressed by 3D SRC become one-third of the data compressed by 2D SRC on average.