Applications that require Internet access to remote 3D datasets are often
limited by the storage costs of 3D models. Several compression methods are
available to address these limits for objects represented by triangle meshes.
Many CAD and VRML models, however, are represented as quadrilateral meshes or
mixed triangle/quadrilateral meshes, and these models may also require
compression. We present an algorithm for encoding the connectivity of such
quadrilateral meshes, and we demonstrate that by preserving and exploiting the
original quad structure, our approach achieves encodings 30 - 80% smaller than
an approach based on randomly splitting quads into triangles. We present both a
code with a proven worst-case cost of 3 bits per vertex (or 2.75 bits per
vertex for meshes without valence-two vertices) and entropy-coding results for
typical meshes ranging from 0.3 to 0.9 bits per vertex, depending on the
regularity of the mesh. Our method may be implemented by a rule for a
particular splitting of quads into triangles and by using the compression and
decompression algorithms introduced in [Rossignac99] and
[Rossignac&Szymczak99]. We also present extensions to the algorithm to compress
meshes with holes and handles and meshes containing triangles and other
polygons as well as quads