Optimized Edgebreaker encoding for large and regular triangle meshes

Abstract

We present a technique aiming to improve the compression of the Edgebreaker CLERS string for large and regular meshes, where regularity is understood as the compactness of the distribution of vertex degrees. Our algorithm uses a specially designed context-based coding to compress the CLERS sequence. It is exceptionally simple to implement and can easily be incorporated into any existing Edgebreaker implementation which uses the Spirale Reversi algorithm for decompression. Even for irregular meshes, it does not carry considerable overhead when compared to the original Edgebreaker encoding. Experimental results show that our procedure is very fast (600000 triangles per second on a PIII 650 MHz for decompression) and leads to compression rates which are, in most cases, superior to those previously reported for large meshes of high regularity.