Abstract:  Paper "Automatic mesh animation preview" by Yi Li, Qiaodong Cui, Fei Dou, Lin Zhang, Zhong Zhou is accepted by ICME 2014.

With growing number of high quality 3D models published online, the technique of generating efficient and economical 3D model previews has raised increasing concerns. Although several previous works have been done on the preview of static mesh, that of animated mesh is different and more complex due to the difficulty in describing the animation. In this paper, we present a novel method of automatic preview generation for 3D mesh animation. A new measure, namely inter-frame surface saliency, which contains both of inter-frame motions and surface saliency in each frame is introduced. Given an animated mesh, an energy function of this measure and camera smoothness is constructed for computing the representative viewpoints in key frames, and an optimal camera path is then generated. A brief but informative preview is created by moving the camera along this path with frame rate control. Finally, we test our method on several mesh animations.