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A Fuzzy Clustering Algorithm for Virtual Character Animation Representation

Boon-Seng Chew, Lap-Pui Chau, Senior Member, IEEE, and Kim-Hui Yap, Senior Member, IEEE
AbstractThe use of realistic humanoid animations generated through motion capture (MoCap) technology is widespread across various 3-D applications and industries. However, the existing compression techniques for such representation often do not consider the implicit coherence within the anatomical structure of a human skeletal model and lacks portability for transmission consideration. In this paper, a novel concept virtual character animation image (VCAI) is proposed. Built upon a fuzzy clustering algorithm, the data similarity within the anatomy structure of a virtual character (VC) model is jointly considered with the temporal coherence within the motion data to achieve efcient data compression. Since the VCA is mapped as an image, the use of image processing tool is possible for efcient compression and delivery of such content across dynamic network. A modied motion lter (MMF) is proposed to minimize the visual discontinuity in VCAs motion due to the quantization and transmission error. The MMF helps to remove high frequency noise components and smoothen the motion signal providing perceptually improved VCA with lessened distortion. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is competitive in compression efciency and decoded VCA quality against the state-of-the-art VCA compression methods, making it suitable for providing quality VCA animation to low-powered mobile devices. Index TermsCompression, fuzzy c-mean clustering and realism, virtual character animation.

avatars animation for both humanoid and articulated gures. In the current context, the use of virtual character (VC) content is widespread across multiple areas such as entertainment, gaming, and humancomputer interaction (HCI) applications due to the increasing demand of such realistic skeletal motions for different needs. The rapid advancement in processing capabilities and increasing functions of low-powered mobile devices have also brought upon a new evolution where the application of VCA data is no longer limited to a standard powered machine or server system. With better graphics abilities and higher processing power packed within the lower powered devices, the use of realistic avatars motion for interaction in virtual environment on laptops, PDAs, and mobile devices is now feasible. II. RELATED WORK The effective compression of VCA information plays an integral role in the application of such data on low-powered devices. Previously, techniques on 3-D model compression focus on the mesh simplication and connectivity compression issues. These helped to achieve effective data reduction for mesh-based model as investigated in [9] and [14]. However, the use of such method may not be suitable for skeletal-based 3-D model where structural and temporal characteristics of human captured motions provide a greater free space for exploitation in achieving effective compression of data. Recently, [1] and [2] proposed a scheme suitable for exploiting the structural attributes of VC models to achieve efcient compression. They investigated the effects of power consumption on mobile devices in respect to the reduced data size and compared their ndings with the existing MPEG-BAP standard. In [6], the predictive and DCT scheme for exploiting the temporal coherence within the motion capture data is explored. They implemented the MPEG-4 BBA encoder and reported their ndings on motion capture data. In [7], another approach of achieving compression for the motion database is presented. Here, correlations among motions within the database are used to achieve overall data reduction. Reference [8] investigated the use of PCA to compress motion segments and [18] discussed the adaption of human motions representation into MPEG-4 and MPEG-21 architectures. Reference [25] discussed the implementation of exponential map for the representation of rotation and compared its advantages and limitations against other conventional schemes. Lastly, [22] proposed the progressive transmission of human motion sequences and its delivery across lossy communication network. In this paper, a new technique for VCA representation and compression is proposed. The proposed scheme exploits the inherent models characteristic for both temporal and structural aspects, and achieves

I. INTRODUCTION HE increase in demand for better quality 3-D models and graphical animations is prominent with the technology advancement in processing capabilities and ease of graphic creations for the last few decades. With the recent surges in both the gaming and entertainment industries in alignment to the evolving Internet towards a content based sharing ideology, the cause for nding better 3-D representations, faster content creation techniques, more efcient compression schemes, and better delivery of such graphical contents dynamically across different users becomes critical. Among the different 3-D generation schemes, the use of motion capture (MoCap) technology for synthesizing complex human motion with virtual creation emerged as an effective solution towards generating realistic
Manuscript received January 14, 2010; revised May 17, 2010; accepted September 21, 2010. Date of publication September 30, 2010; date of current version January 19, 2011. The data used in this project was obtained from mocap.cs.cmu.edu. The database was created with funding from NSF EIA-0196217. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Prof. Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann. The authors are with the School of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798 (e-mail: bschew@pmail. ntu.edu.sg; elpchau@ntu.edu.sg; ekhyap@ntu.edu.sg). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TMM.2010.2082512

1520-9210/$26.00 2010 IEEE

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effective data reduction using conventional image processing technique [12]. Recently, there is an increasing trend in the use of image processing standards on geometrical data. In [16], the static 3-D model is encoded using images to reduce the dimension complexity of processing geometrical models and achieve compression using standard image tools. In [15] and [17], the streaming of such image coded 3-D model was investigated. Our work differs from these techniques where we initiate an efcient scheme suited for VCA encoding. Here, we solely focus on the compression of the VCA using both temporal and structural nature of the skeletals motion. As a summary, the contributions of this paper are as follows: present a new concept of virtual character animation image mapping (VCAI) and develop a framework for constructing animation images from real-world motion capture data; propose a fuzzy clustering algorithm, to consider the data similarity within the anatomy structure of a virtual character model and jointly considered it with the temporal coherence to achieve efcient data compression; show that the VCAI scheme coupled with motion modied lter (MMF) is capable of producing quality VCA sequences with high compression ratio. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section III introduces the matrix representation of the VCA motion data. Section IV discusses the framework and algorithm of the proposed VCAI scheme. The experiment results of the proposed method are presented in Section V. Lastly, we provide the conclusion in Section VI. III. VCA MATRIX REPRESENTATION This section introduces the matrix representation used to dene the VCA. Firstly, the motion deviation within the joints of the skeletal avatar across the frame sequences of the VCA can be described using a collection of rotation and translation movement dened by . Here, denotes the number of degrees of freedom (DOF) within the skeletal model where and indicates the frame numbers in the animation . , describe the entire anisequence for mation. The rows of the matrix from contain the joint modications of a single DOF across the frames and represent the DOFs of a single frame . For , the initial DOFs denote the root positions of the VC model. The remaining DOFs of the skeletal model consist of the Euler angles used by different joint nodes for obtaining the corresponding joints position. The structure of joint hierarchical formation and VCA (run and leap) sequences are shown is apin Figs. 1 and 2, respectively. For consistency, plied for all skeletal models in this paper. However, it is worth noting that the proposed scheme is still applicable for alternative models with a different value. IV. PROPOSED VCA COMPRESSION APPROACH A. Proposed Framework The MPEG-4 [5], [11], [13] community have constantly played an important role in the development of VCA. In this

Fig. 1. Skeletal representation of the VCA model denoting the hierarchical characteristic between individual joints. Figure of VC consists of 31 total joint nodes with 62 DOFs. The initial three DOFs denote the root position of the skeleton model and remaining n-3 DOFs of the VC consist of the Euler angles needed by the individual node for decoding the respective joint positions.

Fig. 2. VCA of run and leap sequence 49_05 and running sequence 02_03. The motion sequence (a) and (b) consist of a total of 164 and 173 frames, respectively. The original AMC les are approximately (a) 128 KB and (b) 135 KB in size.

context, the MPEG-4 body animation parameter (BAP) technique provides an efcient platform for the representation and compression of virtual human models, thus making it suitable for usage in low-powered mobile devices and communication in interactive networks. Our proposed VCA compression method is built based upon the MPEG-4 standard, whereby through the transmission of different DOFs of the skeletal avatar, the animation of the VC can be easily realized.

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Fig. 3. VCAI encoding process with motion smoothening. (a) shows the original Dof trajectory values against frame number for 02_07 sequence. (b) shows the image mapping of Dof values to grayscale image. (c) denotes the VCAI which consider both anatomical structure of VC and motion coherence. (d) shows the VCAI with MMF for motion smoothening.

B. Temporal Coherence Within Motion The joint modications of the skeletal model used to decode the positions of the skeletal joint node are denoted . During the encoding process, the as for of each DOF are (min,max) values of determined. The motion data for the different joints are then normalized and encoded into a 16-bit grayscale image suited for transmission. It can be observed that since each node of the avatar shows small deviations between frames of animation, the motion signal obtained from each DOF will exhibit strong coherence in the temporal direction as demonstrated in Fig. 3(a) and (b). Thus, image transform techniques can be applied to further exploit such characteristic and achieve better energy compaction during compression. Fig. 3 shows the VCAI encoding process with motion smoothening using 02_07 swordplay sequence as an example. Another important consideration lies in the length of the motion sequence. Given a longer sequence of frames in comparison to a shorter one, the correlation within the sequence decreased comparatively resulting in a lower decoded VCA is partitioned into quality. To address this issue, matrix image segments of each to further increase the VCAIs correlation before compression. Similar to the use of macroblocks in video compression, the use of multiple image maps for the VCA yields a better computation efciency and smaller degradation in decoded skeletal motion quality. The image

Fig. 4. Sequence of image maps denote motion of the skeletal avatar for the walking animation. The motion data consist of 652 frames of motions. Individually, each image map is normalized and compressed using JPEG 2000 encoder.

maps generated without the clustering process, created from the walking motion sequence, are demonstrated in Fig. 4. The discussion to this point explained the current technique exploiting the temporal characteristic of VCs motion to achieve data compression. However, a brief observation on Fig. 4 exposes the inherent dissimilarity of motion signals across DOFs

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when the individual motion modication parameters are positioned according to their original index. The following sections propose a solution to re-index the different motion data according to their structural positions and discuss the use of a fuzzy approach to achieve clustering of similar DOFs parameter to form more efcient image maps before compression. C. Fuzzy C-Mean Clustering Approach The full VCA sequence is earlier dened as . as the DOF data considered for We described , each data point in this case has some clustering. In graded membership or degree of belonging to individual clusdenes the measurement of ters. The graded coefcient membership respective to the th cluster. The cluster membership to each data point is normalized as (1) Unlike conventional k-means algorithm where each data point is assumed to be in exactly one cluster, the centroid in algorithm is determined by the mean of all points and weighted by the graded membership to different clusters. We have the centroid as

for 3-D dimensional axis. Thus, to speed up and improve the , the DOFs are sorted based on their performance of the respective axis before clustering. Next, to record the changes in index order for the different DOFs, an order index list is maintained throughout the whole encoding process. The index list is made up of entries of 6 bits by numerical values to constantly keep track of the changes in DOFs index orders and sent prior to the VCA image to the decoder for ease of decoding. D. VCAI Compression and Motion Smoothening In this paper, the J2K standard is adopted for its performances and robustness in compressing both natural and geometry images as we earlier reported in [17]. J2K also offers better artifact performances over JPEG where blocking and ringing artifacts are both signicantly prominent in JPEG for highly compressed image. For the case of J2K, since the encoding process is not constraint to the blocks encoding limitation, thus blocking artifact is non-present. The ringing artifacts, also known as Gibbs phenomenon, cause undesired signal oscillations around the sharp transition within the signal. This effect is present within both algorithms and translates to motion jittering in the VCA. Here, a modied motion lter (MMF) based on Gaussian low-pass lter is applied. The MMF preserved the main signal components in the VCA containing the fundamental motions and remove the high-frequency noise components. For image compression, the Gaussian-based lter is not an ideal solution for removing the ringing artifacts in image as it blurred the image edges causing an undesired degradation in the image quality perceptually. On the contrary, observations from our experiments showed that such results are subjectively reversed for the VCAI animation. Technically, although the MMF blurred the VCAI in the image domain as shown in Fig. 3(d), this process translates to the smoothening of the motion trajectories in the VCA, thus causing the resulted perceptual quality of the animation to be signicantly improved. E. VCAI Mapping and Error Metric The clustered VCA images earlier generated from Section IV-C rearranged the DOFs positions according to their structural similarities, thus increasing the spatial coherence in VCAI substantially. The VCAI is then compressed using J2K to generate the resultant 16-bit image prior transmission. Let , , and denote is the total frames in a VCA the compressed bitstream. sequence and is the total DOFs parameters here. Each set of compressed cluster VCA images produces a corresponding and values dependent on the clustering process and channel conditions. Recall that the original VCA sequence is initially partitioned into segments before compression, the compressed data size of individual VCAI segments can now be , and the nal compressed size from dened as all J2K images is denoted as . Lastly, the J2K where joint positions denoted images are decoded back to can be used to quantify the decoded by VCA quality. is the joint index where where is the total number of joint nodes in the VCA. In this proposed in paper, the displacement error per frame

(2)

is any real number greater than 1. is denoted as the number of clusters here. The solution to determine the graded membership is dened as (3) The optimization process constantly update the graded memand clusters centers during each iteration . bership The objective here is to minimize the cost function where

(4)

During the optimization, the means of the data points eventually separate and the graded membership progressively shifts towards the 0 and 1 values until the termination criterion is process can be found in achieved. Further details of the [27]. Fig. 3(b) and (c) shows the decoded VCA images from the process. denotes the Euclidean norm used to measure the similarity of the data against the centroid. In [24], the Pearson correlation distance is considered instead of the Euclidean approach. However, since the computation cost of the algorithm is substantially higher and considering the future use of VCA is inclined towards network transmission, the Euclidean distance is a preferred choice in our work. It should be noted that the DOFs data encompasses Euler modications of joints

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TABLE I RESULTS FOR THE COMPRESSION PERFORMANCE OF THE VCA MAPPING TECHNIQUE PRESENTED. HERE, FNORIGINAL MOTION CAPTURE FILENAME, DESCTHE DESCRIPTION OF THE MOTION SEQUENCE, AMCTHE AMC FILE SIZE IN [KB], FrNUMBER OF FRAMES IN SEQUENCE, NsNUMBER OF SEGMENTS, NORMALIZED DISTANCE, CrCOMPRESSION RATIO CsCOMPRESSED FILE SIZE OF VCAI DATA, DefDISPLACEMENT ERROR PER FRAME,

[1] and normalized distance from [6] are used as the criteria for objective quality evaluation. , the resulting motion of all joints position from For the decoded VCA model is denoted as where describe the 3-D joint positions for the skeletal model across all is dened as the original VCA sequence frames. without undergoing the compression process, thus providing a benchmark for comparison between the two methods. The error function is dened as follows, where

denotes the set of VCA images that reFinally, sults in the best compression efcacy and error performances determined from the iterative process (7). V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS This section presents the results obtained from the VCAI method explained in the previous section for 16 sets of motion with varying characteristics. The last four sets of results consist of simulated animal motion using human subjects as actors to perform the dedicated movements. In this paper, the Acclaim skeleton (ASF) and motion capture le (AMC) used as the standard formats for the experiment were obtained from the online motion database [10]. In order to evaluate the efcacy of our method, the experiments were performed based on VCA motion ranging from basic human movements (running and walking) to actions of higher complexity such as the cartwheeling and swordplaying procedures. It is worth noting that the proposed algorithm extends to other formats, including the MPEG-4 BAP, which can be used as the common representation layer for the motion capture information; thus, our proposed method is not the only constraint to the existing data representation tested. Table I presents the compression and error performances of the VCA motion data using VCAI method for near lossless comdenotes the original motion capture lepression. Here, is the motion description, and represents the name, AMC le size in [KB]. The total frame count and compressed le size of the clustered VCA data in [KB] is denoted as and , respectively. The displacement error per frame (5) and normalized distortion metrics (6) for all sequences are shown in and column of Table I, respectively. To solve (7), the optimal result from 100 simulation cycles of each sequence is determined. Table I demonstrates that the VCAI mapping technique is able to achieve an average of 7.5231 compression ratio against the original AMC le without any visible degradation in the reconstructed motion quality. The proposed VCAI performs the additional task of considering the DOFs coherence based on their allocated joint positions. Thus, , the similar DOFs motion data are iteratively by using

(5) The error measurement (5) is based on the evaluation of joints position obtained from the original and decoded virtual characters motion. The normalized distance metric from [6] provides an alternative objective measurement to determine the distortion. Based on the motion paramesuch as quaternion, represents the ters is the original. decoded set of DOFs motion parameters and The distortion metric is shown in (6):

(6) is used to describe different motion paIn (6), the index rameters used to represent the rotation angles of the VCA. where denotes the total number of motion parameters used. From the experiment, we have observed that the joint positions give a better overview of the VCA quality, relating better to the subjective evaluation of the resultant animation quality compared to the normalized distance. For the completeness of the paper, we provide the simulation results of both metrics in the following tables: (7)

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TABLE II RESULTS FOR THE COMPRESSION PERFORMANCE OF THE VCAI ARE PRESENTED. HERE, FNORIGINAL MOTION CAPTURE FILENAME, DescTHE DESCRIPTION OF THE MOTION SEQUENCE, CS_1COMPRESSED FILE SIZE OF UNCLUSTERED VCA DATA, CS_2COMPRESSED FILE SIZE OF CLUSTERED VCA DATA, DEF_1DISPLACEMENT ERROR PER FRAME OF UN-CLUSTERED VCA DATA, DEF_2DISPLACEMENT ERROR PER FRAME OF CLUSTERED VCA DATA, DNORM_1NORMALIZED DISTANCE OF UN-CLUSTERED VCA DATA, DNORM_2NORMALIZED DISTANCE OF CLUSTERED VCA DATA, CR_1COMPRESSION RATIO OF UNCLUSTERED VCA DATA, AND CR_2COMPRESSION RATIO OF CLUSTERED VCA DATA

Fig. 5. Comparison results for the lossy compression of VCAI technique for sequence (a-b)02_01 and (c-d)02_03 are reported. Here, DEF_1(unclustered) and DEF_2(VCAI) denotes the displacement error per frame and dnorm_1(unclustered) and dnorm_2(VCAI) denote the normalized distance. (a) and (c) show the simulation result of DEF versus Size(bytes) and data size (bytes) with its respective Cr . (b) and (d) show the simulation result of dnorm versus Size(bytes) and data size (bytes) with its respective Cr .

clustered before compression. In an earlier paper [6], the compression factor for a group of different VCA motion is reported from 4.710 using the predictive based encoding method range of 0.210.221. In our simulation, with average it is shown that the proposed VCAI method maintained a conwith average stantly stable performance of 7.08.0 performances of 0.0001869 for the different length of motion sequences of different complexity. From observation, the VCAI encoding scheme produces high-quality VCA sequences with

little to non-perceivable perception quality deterioration of the skeletal models motion upon lossless decoding. , , and compression Table II compared the ratio of 11 different VCA motions against its unclustered counterpart. For consistency, we denote the notation for parameters in the unclustered scheme to be Cr_1, DEF_1, Dnorm_1, and clustered VCAI method to be Cr_2, DEF_2, and Dnorm_2. The result in Table II shows that the VCAI method outperforms its unclustered counterpart in term of both error and compression

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Fig. 6. Comparison results for the lossy compression of VCAI technique for sequence (a-b)49_05 and (c-d)49_06 are reported. Here, DEF_1(unclustered) and DEF_2(VCAI) denotes the displacement error per frame and dnorm_1(unclustered) and dnorm_2(VCAI) denote the normalized distance. (a) and (c) show the simulation result of DEF versus Size(bytes) and data size (bytes) with its respective Cr . (b) and (d) show the simulation result of dnorm versus Size(bytes) and data size (bytes) with its respective Cr .

Fig. 7. Comparison results for the lossy compression of VCAI(MMF) against VCAI for sequence (a-b)02_01 and (c-d)02_03 are reported. The R-D plot from low to high Cr is presented in the gures. (a) and (c) denote the results from the original VCAI method. (b) and (d) represent the improved experimental results with the VCAI(MMF).

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Fig. 8. Reconstructed frames on varying motion sequences with the VCAI scheme. The individual sequence are clustered based on their DOFs similarities using FCM and compressed using the J2K standard. Both the motion temporal coherence and skeletal structure of the VC is exploited to improve compression efciency and visual performance. (a) 02_01 Walking action. (b) 02_03 Running and jogging. (c) 49_05 Running and leaping. (d) 49_06 Cartwheel action. (e) 49_14 Dancing action. (f) 49_21 Acrobatic action. (g) 55_08 Monkeys action. (h) 55_12 Bear Dancing.

performance. On the average, the VCAI method is able to with for achieved an average of difference sequences as demonstrated in Table II. The proposed VCAI also did well against [1] where compression rate of of 0.1714 is initially reported. 1.72.5 for varying To further reduce the data sizes needed to encode the VCA sequence, the compression rate of the J2K is varied from to generate the lossy compressed stream for each motion sequence. The rate distortion performance from both lossy compression techniques are presented in Figs. 5 and 6. The simulation results for 02_01(walking), 02_03(running), 49_05(run and leap), and 49_06(cartwheel) motion sequences are reported here. In the gures, the primary axis denotes and the secondary the error performance vertical axis denotes compression ratio . The experimental result against it unclustered counterpart is also provided in all gures. From the plots, it is observed that the value is reduced accordingly as the compression rate of the J2K encoder is increased. For a higher , there is a proportional . The drop in error quality as determined by experimental result shows that the proposed VCAI method and outperforms the unclustered scheme in term of both

performances, consistently over different bit budget of the VCA. An interesting observation can be seen in Fig. 6(c) improvement is smaller in and (d) where the gain in comparison to the others plots. This is due to the limited coherence presented in both structural and temporal data of the cartwheel sequence, thus decreasing the encoding efciency of both algorithms. However in all cases, the VCAI shows consistently better R-D performance for different VCA sequences with varying bit rate. Lastly, Fig. 7 demonstrates the lossy performances of VCAI (MMF) for 02_01 and 02_03 sequences. The simulations results demonstrated that the proposed VCAI technique coupled with the MMF is capable of achieving a high compression ratio of 120:1 and 85:1 for both skeletons motion sequences tested . Without the while maintaining a reasonable low MMF, this compression performance will result in for the VCAI method. The reported results are also competitive against the observations reported in [6] where of up to 72:1 can be achieved and of 1.737 in [7] for varying distortion. The experiment shows that although it is using our extechnically possible to achieve a higher isting method, the subjective lost in quality by the decoded VCA

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is unacceptable visually during observation. The visual evaluation of the compressed stream demonstrated from the VCAI (MMF) showed perceptually minor foot skates and swaying on . Using the the VCAs motion where the resultant is achievable at a of apVCAI (MMF) method, this proximately 120:1 for 02_01 walking sequence and 85:1 for , where 02_03 running sequence. In the case of only minor visual artifacts or near original motion sequence is obtained, our proposed method is able to achieve the desired quality at a competitive compression ratio of 100:1 and 60:1 on both tested sequences. Thus, this makes VCAI (MMF) suitable for low-powered mobile devices which need to satisfy the constraint of limited data capacity. Fig. 8 shows the reconstructed frames of varying motion sequences using the VCAI scheme. The video presentation for the proposed VCAI (MMF) method across highly compressed range is available online at [26]. VI. CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION In this paper, a novel concept namely virtual character animation image (VCAI) is presented. In contrast to previous literatures, our proposed scheme considered both the anatomical characteristics of the VC and inherent temporal coherence of the skeletals motion, and jointly mapped the two characteristics into a VCAI prior compression. The joint consideration of both the structural and temporal characteristics of the VCA, mapped and represented in a 2-D image for compression and transmission, was never investigated previously. Coupled with an MMF, which overcomes the limitation of ringing artifacts in image compression for VCA, the VCAI (MMF) provides highly compressed VCA at low quality degradation across varying bit rates. Experimental results show that the proposed VCAI (MMF) is more efcient compared to the existing predictive and transform methods. In general, our method is able to achieve a competitive compression ratio of up to 120:1 for VCAI with minor visual artifacts. The VCAI outperforms the existing literature where compression ratio of up to 72:1 is reported for varying distortion. One limitation faced during the work involves the need for prior analysis of the entire motion signal for normalization which could increase computing time. The solution to it involves partitioning the full VCA sequence into smaller motion segments. This allowed the different motion blocks to be individually encoded and compressed to reduce the latency time and complexity incurred within the processing stages. For future works, we are looking into the prospect of performing progressive streaming of VCAI data across multicasting networks where dedicated constraints in data sizes and bandwidth limitation applies. We will like to further investigate techniques that can efciently stream the VCA under such constraints and ensure its smooth delivery across lossy communication networks. REFERENCES
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Boon-Seng Chew received the B.Eng. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2005. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in information engineering from the School of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Nanyang Technological University. His current research interests include 3-D graphics/animation compression and transmission, signal processing, and multimedia application.

CHEW et al.: A FUZZY CLUSTERING ALGORITHM FOR VIRTUAL CHARACTER ANIMATION REPRESENTATION

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Lap-Pui Chau (SM03) received the B.Eng. degree with rst class honors in electronic engineering from Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, U.K., and the Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering from Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, in 1992 and 1997, respectively. In 1996, he was with the Tritech Microelectronics, Singapore, as a Senior Engineer. Since 1997, he has been with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, as a Research Fellow, then as an Assistant Professor before becoming an Associate Professor. His current research interests include streaming multimedia, multimedia coding and compression, and very large scale integration for multimedia signal processing. Dr. Chau is a Chair of the Technical Committee on the Circuits and Systems for Communications, a Member of the Technical Committee on the Multimedia Systems and Applications, and a Member of the Technical Committee on the Visual Signal Processing and Communications of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. He is currently the Chairman of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Singapore Chapter. He has served as a Member of Singapore Digital Television Technical Committee from 1998 to 1999. He has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MULTIMEDIA, and is currently serving as an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS FOR VIDEO TECHNOLOGY, and the IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS. Since 2009, he has been an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer.

Kim-Hui Yap (SM09) received the B.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, in 1998 and 2002, respectively. Currently, he is a faculty member at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His main research interests include image/video processing, media content analysis, and computational intelligence. He has contributed actively in the elds of image indexing and retrieval, adaptive image processing, and computational intelligence in media processing. He has numerous publications in various international journals, book chapters, and conference proceedings. He has authored a book entitled Adaptive Image Processing: A Computational Intelligence Perspective, 2nd Edition (Boca Raton, FL: CRC, 2009), and edited a book entitled Intelligent Multimedia Processing with Soft Computing (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2005). Dr. Yap has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE MAGAZINE, and as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Signal Processing Systems. He has served as the Treasurer of the IEEE Singapore Signal Processing Chapter and the Committee Member of the IEEE Singapore Computational Intelligence Chapter. He served as the Finance Chair of 2010 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, and the Workshop Co-chair of the 2009 MDM International Workshop on Mobile Media Retrieval, amongst others.