A continuous, editable representation for deforming mesh sequences with separate signals for time, pose and shape

It is increasingly popular to represent non-rigid motion using a deforming mesh sequence: a discrete sequence of frames, each of which is given as a mesh with a common graph structure. Such sequences have the flexibility to represent a wide range of mesh deformations used in practice, but they are also highly redundant, expensive to store, and difficult to edit in a time-coherent manner. We address these limitations with a continuous representation that extracts redundancy in three separate phases, leading to separate editable signals in time, pose and shape. The representation can be applied to any deforming mesh sequence, in contrast to previous domain-specific approaches. By modifying the three signal components, we demonstrate time-coherent editing operations such as local repetition of part of a sequence, frame rate conversion and deformation transfer. We also show that our representation makes it possible to design new deforming sequences simply by sketching a curve in a 2D pose space.