Geometric compression through topological surgery

Abstract

The abundance and importance of complex 3-D data bases in major industry segments, the affordability of interactive 3-D rendering for office and consumer use, and the exploitation of the Internet to distribute and share 3-D data have intensified the need for an effective 3-D geometric compression technique that would significantly reduce the time required to transmit 3-D models over digital communication channels, and the amount of memory or disk space required to store the models. Because the prevalent representation of 3-D models for graphics purposes is polyhedral and because polyhedral models are in general triangulated for rendering, this article introduces a new compressed representation for complex triangulated models and simple, yet efficient, compression and decompression algorithms. In this scheme, vertex positions are quantized within the desired accuracy, a vertex spanning tree is used to predict the position of each vertex from 2,3, or 4 of its ancestors in the tree, and the correction vectors are entropy encoded. Properties, such as normals, colors, and texture coordinates, are compressed in a similar manner. The connectivity is encoded with no loss of information to an average of less than two bits per triangle. The vertex spanning tree and a small set of jump edges are used to split the model into a simple polygon. A triangle spanning tree and a sequence of marching bits are used to encode the triangulation of the polygon. Our approach improves on Michael Deering's pioneering results by exploiting the geometric coherence of several ancestors in the vertex spanning tree, preserving the connectivity with no loss of information, avoiding vertex repetitions, and using about three fewer bits for the connectivity. However, since decompression requires random access to all vertices, this method must be modified for hardware rendering with limited onboard memory. Finally, we demonstrate implementation results for a variety of VRML models with up to two orders of magnitude compression.

Compression of soft-body animation sequences

“…Some deal with compression of the mesh geometry (vertex positions) (e.g. [1][2][3]), while the rest focus on connectivity (e.g. [4][5][6]).…”

Volumetric video compression for interactive playback

“…isosurfaces) include those by [27,12]. A compression scheme specialized for isosurfaces [29] utilizes the unique property of an isosurface that only the signifi-cant edges and function values defined on a vertex are required to be encoded.…”

Hierarchical generalized triangle strips

“…His algorithm employs lossy compression for the quantization of coordinate values, as well as a vertex cache to further take advantage of spatial coherence. Taubin and Rossignac [10] construct a mesh representation using two interlocked trees: a spanning tree of triangles for connectivity; and a spanning tree of vertices. The geometry information is compressed using a variable-length lossy encoding.…”