ECE Distinguished Lecture 2025: Pamela Cosman

ECE Distinguished Lecture 2025: Pamela Cosman

Title: Keynode-Driven 3D Dynamic Mesh Compression

Abstract: The compression of real-world scanned 3D human dynamic meshes is an emerging research area. The inherent depth and multitude of viewing angles enabled by 3D dynamic meshes contribute to an enriched experience across various applications, such as telepresence, virtual reality, and 3D digital streaming. Unlike synthesized dynamic meshes with fixed topology, such as those created using graphic design software, scanned dynamic meshes often not only have varying topology across frames but also scan defects such as holes and outliers, increasing the complexity of prediction and compression. Additionally, human meshes often combine rigid and non-rigid motions, making accurate prediction and encoding significantly more difficult compared to objects that exhibit purely rigid motion.

This talk presents a compression method designed for real-world scanned human dynamic meshes, leveraging embedded key nodes. The temporal motion of each vertex is formulated as a distance-weighted combination of transformations from neighboring key nodes, requiring the transmission of solely the transformations of the sparse key nodes. To improve rate-distortion performance, we integrate semantic segmentation of body parts into the codec, allowing region-specific transformation modeling. This allows deformation-rich regions to use affine transformations, while retaining simpler rigid models elsewhere. This bimodal method achieves more accurate mesh deformations, especially in sequences involving complex non-rigid motion, without compromising compression efficiency in simpler regions.

Bio: Pamela Cosman is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at UC San Diego. She received her B.S. from the California Institute of Technology in 1987 and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1993. After postdocs at Stanford University and the University of Minnesota, she joined the faculty of UC San Diego in 1995. Her administrative and editorial positions have included Director of the Center for Wireless Communications, Associate Dean for Students of the Jacobs School, and Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. She became the Chair of the ECE Department in 2024. She has published over 300 papers on image/video processing and wireless communications, as well as an advice book for girls contemplating STEM careers (Free to Choose STEM, IEEE eBooks), and two children’s books that introduce engineering and math concepts through fiction. Prof. Cosman is a Fellow of the IEEE, the holder of the Jack Keil Wolf Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering, and winner of national and regional leadership awards from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA), the Athena Foundation, and the San Diego County Engineering Council.