An efficient 3D mesh compression technique based on triangle fan structure

In this paper, we propose an efficient compression algorithm for 3D triangular meshes, consisting of topology data and geometry data. First, the vertex degree warping technique is proposed to compress the topology data losslessly. The proposed algorithm exploits the geometrical information to efficiently encode the topology data, while most conventional algorithms process the topology data and the geometry data independently. Second, the dual parallelogram prediction technique is proposed as an effective geometry prediction scheme. By using forward and backward parallelograms, the proposed algorithm provides smaller prediction errors than the conventional parallelogram prediction scheme. Simulation results on various mesh models demonstrate that the proposed algorithm yields higher compression ratio than the conventional mesh compression algorithms proposed in Touma and Gotsman (Proceedings of the Graphics Interface '98, June 1998, pp. 26-34) and MPEG-4 3D mesh coding (3DMC) standard ISO/IEC 14496-2 (Information Technology - Coding of Audio-Visual Objects - Part 2: Visual, July 2001. The 3DMC reference software is available from http://www.sait.samsung.co.kr/shhc).