Advancing fan-front: 3D triangle mesh compression using fan based traversal

摘要

Connectivity compression techniques for very large 3D triangle meshes are based on clever traversals of the graph representing the mesh, so as to avoid the repeated references to vertices. In this paper we present a new algorithm for compressing large 3D triangle meshes through the successive conquest of triangle fans. The connectivity of vertices in a fan is implied. As each fan is traversed, the current mesh boundary is advanced by the fan-front. The process is recursively continued till the entire mesh is traversed. The mesh is then compactly encoded as a sequence of fan configuration codes. The fan configuration code comprehensively encodes the connectivity of the fan with the rest of the mesh. There is no need for any further special operators like split codes and additional vertex offsets. The number of fans is typically one-fourth of the total number of triangles. Only a few of the fan configurations occur with high frequency, enabling excellent connectivity information compression using range encoding. A simple implementation shows significant improvements, on the average, in bit-rate per vertex, compared to earlier reported techniques.