Vector Quantization in Multiresolution Mesh Compression

Irregularly sampled triangular meshes contain vertices in a geometric space with arbitrary connectivity degrees. From a compression point of view, this letter presents a multiresolution analysis for irregular meshes using progressive vector quantization (VQ). We show that VQ exploits the joint distribution of coordinates in the geometric space, thus improving the compression efficiency. Based on the presented compression algorithm, we further propose an equalization algorithm that properly balances between connectivity downsampling and geometry quantization and achieves the optimal rate-distortion performance under constrained bit rates.