Efficient Interpolation of Articulated Shapes Using Mixed Shape Spaces

Interpolation between compatible triangle meshes that represent different poses of some object is a fundamental operation in geometry processing. A common approach is to consider the static input shapes as points in a suitable shape space and then use simple linear interpolation in this space to find an interpolated shape. In this paper, we present a new interpolation technique that is particularly tailored for meshes that represent articulated shapes. It is up to an order of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art methods and gives very similar results. To achieve this, our approach introduces a novel shape space that takes advantage of the underlying structure of articulated shapes and distinguishes between rigid parts and non-rigid joints. This allows us to use fast vertex interpolation on the rigid parts and resort to comparatively slow edge-based interpolation only for the joints.