Succinct representations of planar maps

This paper addresses the problem of representing the connectivity information of geometric objects, using as little memory as possible. As opposed to raw compression issues, the focus here is on designing data structures that preserve the possibility of answering incidence queries in constant time. We propose, in particular, the first optimal representations for 3-connected planar graphs and triangulations, which are the most standard classes of graphs underlying meshes with spherical topology. Optimal means that these representations asymptotically match the respective entropy of the two classes, namely 2 bits per edge for 3-connected planar graphs, and 1.62 bits per triangle, or equivalently 3.24 bits per vertex for triangulations. These representations support adjacency queries between vertices and faces in constant time.