Incremental Parametric Refinement for Progressive Lossless mesh compression

Purpose and Context

We propose a novel progressive transmission scheme for 3D triangular meshes VALE-09. The intermediate meshes tend to exhibit uniform sampling, which results in visually pleasing meshes and very efficient progressive transmisison.

Methods

The algorithm starts with a coarse version of the original mesh, which is further refined by means of a novel refinement scheme. The mesh refinement is driven by a geometric criterion, in spirit with surface reconstruction algorithms, aiming at generating uniform meshes. The vertices coordinates are also quantized and transmitted in a progressive way, following a geometric criterion, efficiently allocating the bit budget.

With this assumption, the generated intermediate meshes tend to exhibit a uniform sampling. The potential discrepancy between the resulting connectivity and the original one is corrected at the end of the algorithm. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation, yielding very competitive results compared to previous works in terms of rate/distortion trade-off.

Results

Figure 1 shows several intermediate meshes obtained obtained when transmitting the Fertility model. Note the uniform sampling of intermediate levels.

Figure 1 : progressive transmission of the Fertility Model. From left to right : Base mesh, intermediate model (1k vertices), intermediate model (8.5k vertices), final mesh (241k vertices)

Collaboration

This work was performed in collaboration with Raphaëlle Chaine from the LIRIS laboratory