Two- versus three-dimensional object-based video compression

This paper compares two-dimensional (2-D) and three-dimensional (3-D) object modeling in terms of their capabilities and performance (peak signal-to-noise-ratio and visual image quality) for very low bitrate video coding. We show that 2-D object-based coding with affine/perspective transformations and triangular mesh models can simulate almost all capabilities of 3-D object-based approaches using wireframe models at a fraction of the computational cost. Furthermore, experiments indicate that a 2-D mesh-based coder-decoder performs favorably compared to the new H.263 standard in terms of visual quality.