Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a novel method to hierarchically decompose the animated 3d object efficiently by utilizing high-dimensional and multi-scale geometric information. The key idea is to treat the animated surface sequences as a whole and extract the near-rigid components from it. Our approach firstly detects a set of the multi-scale feature points on the animated object and computes approximately invariant signature vectors for these points. Then, exploiting both the geometric attributes and the local signature vector of each point (vertex) of the animated object, all the points (vertices) of the animated object can be clustered efficiently using a GPU-accelerated mean shift clustering algorithm. To refine the decomposition boundaries, the initially-generated boundaries of the animated object can be further improved by applying a boundary refinement technique based on Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical decomposition technique using a topology merging strategy without introducing additional computations. Our animated object decomposition approach does not require the topological connectivity of the animated object, thus it can be applied for both triangle mesh and point-sampled geometry sequences. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves both good quality results and high performance for the decomposition of animated object.