Geometric compression for progressive transmission

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel geometric compression algorithm for meshes, especially terrain models, that uses vertex order for compression and enables progressive, interactive transmission, outperforming some existing methods.

Contribution

The proposed algorithm uniquely uses vertex order to compress coordinates and reconstruct topology, facilitating progressive transmission and slightly better compression ratios.

Findings

Achieves slightly better compression factors than existing algorithms.

Enables progressive and interactive mesh transmission.

Particularly effective for terrain models.

Abstract

The compression of geometric structures is a relatively new field of data compression. Since about 1995, several articles have dealt with the coding of meshes, using for most of them the following approach: the vertices of the mesh are coded in an order such that it contains partially the topology of the mesh. In the same time, some simple rules attempt to predict the position of the current vertex from the positions of its neighbours that have been previously coded. In this article, we describe a compression algorithm whose principle is completely different: the order of the vertices is used to compress their coordinates, and then the topology of the mesh is reconstructed from the vertices. This algorithm, particularly suited for terrain models, achieves compression factors that are slightly greater than those of the currently available algorithms, and moreover, it allows progressive and interactive transmission of the meshes.