Progressive Compression of Triangle Meshes

Abstract

This paper details the first publicly available implementation of the progressive mesh compression algorithm described in the paper entitled "Compressed Progressive Meshes" [R. Pajarola and J. Rossignac, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 6 (2000), pp. 79-93]. Our implementation is generic, modular, and includes several improvements in the stopping criteria and final encoding. Given an input 2-manifold triangle mesh, an iterative simplification is performed, involving batches of edge collapse operations guided by an error metric. During this compression step, all the information necessary for the reconstruction (at the decompression step) is recorded and compressed using several key features: geometric quantization, prediction, and spanning tree encoding. Our implementation allowed us to carry out an experimental comparison of several settings for the key parameters of the algorithm: the local error metric, the position type of the resulting vertex (after collapse), and the geometric predictor.