Dynamically restricted codebook-based vector quantisation scheme for mesh geometry compression

Abstract

The transmission and storage of large amounts of vertex geometry data are required for rendering geometrically detailed 3D models. To alleviate bandwidth requirements, vector quantisation (VQ) is an effective lossy vertex data compression technique for triangular meshes. This paper presents a novel vertex encoding algorithm using the dynamically restricted codebook-based vector quantisation (DRCVQ). In DRCVQ, a parameter is used to control the encoding quality to get the desired compression rate in a range with only one codebook, instead of using different levels of codebooks to get different compression rate. During the encoding process, the indexes of the preceding encoded residual vectors which have high correlation with the current input vector are prestored in a FIFO so that both the codevector searching range and bit rate are averagely reduced. The proposed scheme also incorporates a very effective Laplacian smooth operator. Simulation results show that for various size of mesh models, DRCVQ can reduce PSNR degradation of about 2.5–6 dB at 10 bits per vertex comparative to the conventional vertex encoding method with stationary codebooks and, DRCVQ with arithmetic coding of codevector indexes and Laplacian smoothener can outperform the state-of-art Wavemesh for non-smooth meshes while performing slightly worse for smooth meshes. In addition, we use MPS as codevector search acceleration scheme so that the compression scheme is real-time.