Recent advances in compression of 3D meshes

3D meshes are widely used in graphical and simulation applications for approximating 3D objects. When representing complex shapes in raw data format, meshes consume a large amount of space. Applications calling for compact storage and fast transmission of 3D meshes have motivated the multitude of algorithms developed to compress these datasets efficiently. In this paper we survey recent developments in compression of 3D surface meshes. We survey the main ideas and intuition behind techniques for single-rate and progressive mesh coding. Where possible, we discuss the theoretical results obtained for asymptotic behaviour or optimality of the approach. We also list some open questions and directions for future research.