Most mesh file formats are actually quite verbose. Many of them are even just raw ASCII text. Since they can easily consume a lot of space, we very often want to compress them. One obvious choice would be to use some standard compression method such as gzip. However, you can achieve far better compression rates by taking advantage of the special structure of meshes.
We’ll begin by looking at EdgeBreaker, a scheme for compressing the connectivity of triangle meshes.
J. Rossignac. Edgebreaker: Connectivity compression for triangle meshes. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 5(1):47–61, January-March 1999. [PDF]
J. Rossignac, A. Safanova, and A. Szymczak. 3D compression made simple: Edgebreaker on a Corner Table. In Proceedings of Shape Modeling International Conference, Genoa, Italy May 2001. [PDF]
Another rather different approach to mesh compression is via the spectral mesh analysis that we originally discussed in the context of smoothing. At a very high level, this is roughly analogous to the approach of DCT-based image compression methods such as JPEG.
Here are some of the early papers on mesh compression, which you’ll frequently see referenced in more recent papers:
M. Deering. Geometry compression. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 95, pp. 13–20, 1995. [PDF]
G. Taubin and J. Rossignac. Geometric compression through topologial surgery. ACM Transactions on Graphics 17(2):84–115, April 1998. [PDF]
C. Touma and C. Gotsman. Triangle mesh compression. In Proceedings of Graphics Interface 98, pages 26–34, June 1998. [PDF]
It turns out the EdgeBreaker-type schemes can also be applied quite nicely to non-triangular polygon meshes.
Our in-class presentation was delivered by Eric Lorimer.