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.