Connectivity Compression for Irregular Quadrilateral Meshes

Abstract

Many 3D models used in engineering, scientific, and visualization applications are represented by an irregular mesh of bounding quadrilaterals. We propose a scheme for compressing the connectivity of irregular quadrilateral meshes in 0.26-1.7 bits/quad, a 25-45% savings over randomly splitting quads into triangles and applying triangle mesh compression. Our approach is an extension of the Edgebreaker compression approach and of the Wrap&Zip decompression technique.