Single resolution compression of arbitrary triangular meshes with properties

Triangular meshes are widely used as primary representation of surface models for networked gaming and for complex interactive design in manufacturing. Accurate triangulation of a surface with sharp features (highly varying curvatures, holes) may require an extremely large number Of triangles, Fast transmission of such large triangle meshes is critical to many applications that interactively manipulate geometric models in remote networked environments, The need for a succinct representation is therefore not only to reduce static storage requirements, but also to consume less network bandwidth and thus reduce the transmission time. In this paper we address the problem of defining a space efficient encoding scheme for both lossless and error-bounded lossy compression of triangular meshes that is robust enough to handle directly arbitrary sets of triangles including non-orientable meshes, non-manifold meshes and even non-mesh cases. The compression is achieved by capturing the redundant information in both the topology (connectivity) and geometry with possibly property attributes. Example models and results are also reported. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.