Optimized Edgebreaker encoding for large and regular triangle meshes

Abstract

Summary form only given. The connectivity of a typical triangle mesh representing a 3D object for a graphics or geometric modeling application exhibits a lot of regularity. While a lot of aspects of triangle mesh regularity have not been formally described, the simplest regularity measure is the compactness of the distribution of vertex degrees. In a regular mesh, most of the vertices have degree 6 or close to 6. Algorithms that can effectively take advantage of mesh regularity to decrease the size of the connectivity code will perform better in most practical cases. The Edgebreaker algorithm converts a manifold triangle mesh into a string of symbols in {C,L,E,R,S} (called the CLERS string), each of them corresponding to a triangle of the encoded mesh. The CLERS string can be turned into a binary string using an entropy coding algorithm.