  Human motion capture (mocap) is a widely used technique for digitalizing
human movements. With growing usage, compressing mocap data has received
increasing attention, since compact data size enables efficient storage and
transmission. Our analysis shows that mocap data have some unique
characteristics that distinguish themselves from images and videos. Therefore,
directly borrowing image or video compression techniques, such as discrete
cosine transform, does not work well. In this paper, we propose a novel
mocap-tailored transform coding algorithm that takes advantage of these
features. Our algorithm segments the input mocap sequences into clips, which
are represented in 2D matrices. Then it computes a set of data-dependent
orthogonal bases to transform the matrices to frequency domain, in which the
transform coefficients have significantly less dependency. Finally, the
compression is obtained by entropy coding of the quantized coefficients and the
bases. Our method has low computational cost and can be easily extended to
compress mocap databases. It also requires neither training nor complicated
parameter setting. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme
significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of compression
performance and speed.
