Progressive compression of manifold polygon meshes

This paper presents a new algorithm for the progressive compression of manifold polygon meshes. The input surface is decimated by several traversals that generate successive levels of detail through a specific patch decimation operator which combines vertex removal and local remeshing. The mesh connectivity is encoded by two lists of Boolean error predictions based on the mesh geometry: one for the inserted edges and the other for the faces with a removed center vertex. The mesh geometry is encoded with a barycentric error prediction of the removed vertex coordinates and a local curvature prediction. We also include two methods that improve the rate-distortion performance: a wavelet formulation with a lifting scheme and an adaptive quantization technique. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in terms of compression rates and rate-distortion performance.

Graphical abstractFigure optionsDownload full-size imageDownload high-quality image (256 K)Download as PowerPoint slideHighlights► We present a new progressive mesh compression algorithm. ► The approach handles efficiently any manifold mesh with arbitrary face degrees. ► Improvements are proposed to increase the performance of the algorithm. ► Experiments show the effectiveness of the approach.