Streaming Compression of Triangle Meshes

Abstract

Current mesh compression schemes encode triangles and vertices in an order derived from systematically traversing the connectivity graph. These schemes struggle with gigabyte-sized mesh input where the construction and the usage of the data structures that support topological traversal queries become I/O-inefficient and require large amounts of temporary disk space. Furthermore they expect the entire mesh as input. Since meshes cannot be compressed until their generation is complete, they have to be stored at least once in uncompressed form. We radically depart from the traditional approach to mesh compression and propose a scheme that incrementally encodes a mesh in the order it is given to the compressor using only minimal memory resources. This makes the compression process essentially transparent to the user and practically independent of the mesh size. This is especially beneficial for compressing large meshes, where previous approaches spend significant memory, disk, and I/O resources on pre-processing, whereas our scheme starts compressing after receiving the first few triangles.