GMM-ICQ: A GMM vertex-optimization-based implicitly-connected quadrilateral format for 3D mesh storage

Abstract

3D meshes are commonly utilized and may be considered to be the most popular surface representation in computer graphics due to their simplicity, efficiency and flexibility. However, the explicit storage of mesh vertices and connectivity, as in widely-used PLY and OBJ file formats, leads to substantial memory consumption. This, in turn, directly affects the processing and transmission in downstream applications. Though mesh simplification and mesh compression are common strategies to lessen memory consumption, they exhibit inherent limitations either in maintaining a balance between accuracy, efficiency, memory usage and mesh quality, or breaking the simplicity of explicit storage and struggling with optimizing the trade-off between compression performance and computational resource consumption. To overcome these limitations, inspired by the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), this paper proposes a GMM vertex-optimization-based implicitly-connected quadrilateral format for 3D mesh storage, named GMM-ICQ. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that the GMM-ICQ format achieves efficient compression by retaining only a small amount of vertex information, while preserving sharp features and maintaining relatively high mesh quality. It also exhibits a certain degree of robustness in the presence of noise interference. Furthermore, benefiting from the inherent grid-based connectivity, the GMM-ICQ format maintains the simplicity of explicit storage and can be implemented as a progressive variant without incurring additional computational overhead.