A dual graph approach to 3D triangular mesh compression

The triangular mesh provides one of the most popular representations for 3D graphic models. A typical triangular mesh consists of two different types of data: topological data which specify the connectivity of the mesh and geometrical data which describe information associated with each individual vertex or triangle. We propose a new compression scheme which encode topological data by using the dual graph of the original mesh. It is found that the dual graph can be represented as a degraded binary tree. Furthermore, geometrical data can be coded progressively with local prediction and embedded entropy coding. Experimental results show that an acceptable quality level can be reached at a compression ratio of 60 to 1 for general test models.