A new method for simplification and compression of 3D meshes

Abstract

We focus on the lossy compression of manifold triangle meshes. Our SwingWrapper approach partitions the surface of an original mesh M into simply-connected regions, called triangloids. We compute a new mesh M\u27. Each triangle of M\u27 is a close approximation of a pseudo-triangle of M. By construction, the connectivity of M\u27 is fairly regular and can be compressed to less than a bit per triangle using EdgeBreaker or one of the other recently developed schemes. The locations of the vertices of M\u27 are compactly encoded with our new prediction scheme, which uses a single correction parameter per vertex. For example, a variety of popular models retiled with our approach yield 10 times fewer triangles without exceeding an error of 1% of the radius of the bounding ball. Vertices of M\u27 are encoded with an average of 6 bits, which results in a total storage of 0.4 bits per triangle of the original mesh. The proposed solution may also be used to encode crude meshes for adaptive transmission and for controlling subdivision surfaces