Implant Sprays: Compression of Progressive Tetrahedral Mesh Connectivity

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Date
1999Author
Pajarola, Renato B.
Rossignac, Jaroslaw R.
Szymczak, Andrzej
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Irregular
tetrahedral meshes, which are popular in many engineering and scientific
applications, often contain a large number of vertices. A mesh of V
vertices and T tetrahedra requires 48-V bits or less to store the vertex
coordinates, 4-T-log₂(V) bits to store the tetrahedra-vertex incidence
relations, also called connectivity information, and k-V bits to store
the k-bit value samples associated with the vertices. Given that T is 5 to
7 times larger than V and that V often exceeds 32², the storage space
required for the connectivity is larger than 300-V bits and thus
dominates the overall storage cost. Our "implants spray"
compression approach introduced in this paper reduces this cost to about
30-V bits or less - a 10:1 compression ratio. Furthermore, implant spray
supports the progressive refinement of a crude model through a series of
vertex-splits operations.