Static 3D Triangle Mesh Compression Overview

3D triangle meshes are extremely used to model discrete surfaces, and almost always represented with two tables: one for geometry and another for connectivity. While the raw size of a triangle mesh is of around 200 bits per vertex, by coding cleverly (and separately) those two distinct kinds of information it is possible to achieve compression ratios of 15:1 or more. Different techniques must be used depending on whether single-rate vs. progressive bitstreams are sought; and, in the latter case, on whether or not hierarchically nested meshes are desirable during reconstructio

Mesh compression: Theory and practice.

Three-dimensional meshes (3D meshes, for short) are fast becoming an emerging media type, used in a variety of application domains such as engineering design, manufacture, architecture, bio-informatics, medicine, entertainment, commerce, science, defense, etc. The volume of data of this media type that is being circulated on the internet is increasing very rapidly and is being used as frequently as other media types like text, audio (1D), images and video (2D). Hence, 3D meshes need good processing and visualization methods. Also, the sizes of these meshes are much greater than the other media types mentioned above and often exceeds the memory and bandwidth available for their storage and transmission. Compression schemes for such large 3D meshes have become a subject of intense study lately. Meshes are either made up of triangles or quadrilaterals. Meshes made up of only triangles are called triangle meshes and meshes made up of quadrilaterals are called quadrilateral meshes (quad meshes, for short). A mesh is described by specifying its geometry (vertex coordinates) and its connectivity (adjacencies of the triangles or quadrilaterals). Previous research on mesh compression has been mostly for triangle meshes. Quad meshes were traditionally handled by first triangulating them and then applying triangle mesh compression techniques. In order to avoid this additional triangulation step, a direct technique is proposed for compressing and decompressing the connectivity of quad meshes. This technique takes a quad mesh as input and encodes its connectivity as a sequence of opcodes which can be restored back to the quad mesh, using the decompression technique. A data structure called EdgeTable is introduced to aid in the traversal of a quad mesh during compression. Also, a technique based on constrained Delaunay triangulation for reconstructing the connectivity of a 2D mesh from its geometry and a minimum set of edges is proposed. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-03, page: 1393. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005

Robust and Scalable Transmission of Arbitrary 3D Models over Wireless Networks

We describe transmission of 3D objects represented by texture and mesh over unreliable networks, extending our earlier work for regular mesh structure to arbitrary meshes and considering linear versus cubic interpolation. Our approach to arbitrary meshes considers stripification of the mesh and distributing nearby vertices into different packets, combined with a strategy that does not need texture or mesh packets to be retransmitted. Only the valence (connectivity) packets need to be retransmitted; however, storage of valence information requires only 10% space compared to vertices and even less compared to photorealistic texture. Thus, less than 5% of the packets may need to be retransmitted in the worst case to allow our algorithm to successfully reconstruct an acceptable object under severe packet loss. Even though packet loss during transmission has received limited research attention in the past, this topic is important for improving quality under lossy conditions created by shadowing and interference. Results showing the implementation of the proposed approach using linear, cubic, and Laplacian interpolation are described, and the mesh reconstruction strategy is compared with other methods

Parallel Mesh Processing

Die aktuelle Forschung im Bereich der Computergrafik versucht den zunehmenden Ansprüchen der Anwender gerecht zu werden und erzeugt immer realistischer wirkende Bilder. Dementsprechend werden die Szenen und Verfahren, die zur Darstellung der Bilder genutzt werden, immer komplexer. So eine Entwicklung ist unweigerlich mit der Steigerung der erforderlichen Rechenleistung verbunden, da die Modelle, aus denen eine Szene besteht, aus Milliarden von Polygonen bestehen können und in Echtzeit dargestellt werden müssen. Die realistische Bilddarstellung ruht auf drei Säulen: Modelle, Materialien und Beleuchtung. Heutzutage gibt es einige Verfahren für effiziente und realistische Approximation der globalen Beleuchtung. Genauso existieren Algorithmen zur Erstellung von realistischen Materialien. Es gibt zwar auch Verfahren für das Rendering von Modellen in Echtzeit, diese funktionieren aber meist nur für Szenen mittlerer Komplexität und scheitern bei sehr komplexen Szenen. Die Modelle bilden die Grundlage einer Szene; deren Optimierung hat unmittelbare Auswirkungen auf die Effizienz der Verfahren zur Materialdarstellung und Beleuchtung, so dass erst eine optimierte Modellrepräsentation eine Echtzeitdarstellung ermöglicht. Viele der in der Computergrafik verwendeten Modelle werden mit Hilfe der Dreiecksnetze repräsentiert. Das darin enthaltende Datenvolumen ist enorm, um letztlich den Detailreichtum der jeweiligen Objekte darstellen bzw. den wachsenden Realitätsanspruch bewältigen zu können. Das Rendern von komplexen, aus Millionen von Dreiecken bestehenden Modellen stellt selbst für moderne Grafikkarten eine große Herausforderung dar. Daher ist es insbesondere für die Echtzeitsimulationen notwendig, effiziente Algorithmen zu entwickeln. Solche Algorithmen sollten einerseits Visibility Culling1, Level-of-Detail, (LOD), Out-of-Core Speicherverwaltung und Kompression unterstützen. Anderseits sollte diese Optimierung sehr effizient arbeiten, um das Rendering nicht noch zusätzlich zu behindern. Dies erfordert die Entwicklung paralleler Verfahren, die in der Lage sind, die enorme Datenflut effizient zu verarbeiten. Der Kernbeitrag dieser Arbeit sind neuartige Algorithmen und Datenstrukturen, die speziell für eine effiziente parallele Datenverarbeitung entwickelt wurden und in der Lage sind sehr komplexe Modelle und Szenen in Echtzeit darzustellen, sowie zu modellieren. Diese Algorithmen arbeiten in zwei Phasen: Zunächst wird in einer Offline-Phase die Datenstruktur erzeugt und für parallele Verarbeitung optimiert. Die optimierte Datenstruktur wird dann in der zweiten Phase für das Echtzeitrendering verwendet. Ein weiterer Beitrag dieser Arbeit ist ein Algorithmus, welcher in der Lage ist, einen sehr realistisch wirkenden Planeten prozedural zu generieren und in Echtzeit zu rendern

Implementation of MPEG-4s Subdivision Surfaces Tools

This work is about the implementation of a MPEG-4 decoder for subdivision surfaces, which are powerful 3D paradigms allowing to compactly represent piecewise smooth surfaces. This study will take place in the framework of MPEG-4 AFX, the extension of the MPEG-4 standard including the subdivision surfaces. This document will introduce, with some details, the theory of subdivision surfaces in the two forms present in MPEG-4: plain and detailed/ wavelet subdivision surfaces. It will particularly concentrate on wavelet subdivision surfaces, which permit progressive 3D mesh compression

Numerical simulations of fuel droplet flows using a Lagrangian triangular mesh

The incompressible, Lagrangian, triangular grid code, SPLISH, was converted for the study of flows in and around fuel droplets. This involved developing, testing and incorporating algorithms for surface tension and viscosity. The major features of the Lagrangian method and the algorithms are described. Benchmarks of the algorithms are given. Several calculations are presented for kerosene droplets in air. Finally, extensions which make the code compressible and three dimensional are discussed