  Time-Varying meshes (TVMs), characterized by their varying connectivity and
number of vertices, hold significant potential in immersive media and other
various applications. However, their practical utilization is challenging due
to their time-varying features and large file sizes. Creating a reference mesh
that contains the most essential information is a promising approach to
utilizing shared information within TVMs to reduce storage and transmission
costs. We propose a novel method that employs volume tracking to extract
reference meshes. First, we adopt as-rigid-as-possible (ARAP) volume tracking
on TVMs to get the volume centers for each mesh. Then, we use multidimensional
scaling (MDS) to get reference centers that ensure the reference mesh avoids
self-contact regions. Finally, we map the vertices of the meshes to reference
centers and extract the reference mesh. Our approach offers a feasible solution
for extracting reference meshes that can serve multiple purposes such as
establishing surface correspondence, deforming the reference mesh to different
shapes for I-frame based mesh compression, or defining the global shape of the
TVMs.
