GIT-GVU-98-35

Edgebreaker: Connectivity Compression for Triangle Meshes

Jarek Rossignac

Edgebreaker is a simple scheme for compressing the triangle/vertex incidence graphs (sometimes called connectivity or topology) of three-dimensional triangle meshes. Edgebreaker improves upon the worst case storage required by previously reported schemes, most of which require O(nlogn) bits to store the incidence graph of a mesh of n triangles. Edgebreaker requires only 2n bits or less for simple meshes and can also support fully general meshes by using additional storage per handle and hole. Edgebreaker's compression and decompression processes perform the same traversal of the mesh from one triangle to an adjacent one. At each stage, compression produces an op-code describing the topological relation between the current triangle and the boundary of the remaining part of the mesh. Decompression uses these op-codes to reconstruct the entire incidence graph. Because Edgebreaker's compression and decompression are independent of the vertex locations, they may be combined with a variety of vertex-compressing techniques that exploit topological information about the mesh to better estimate vertex locations. Edgebreaker may be used to compress the connectivity of an entire mesh bounding a 3D polyhedron or the connectivity of a triangulated surface patch whose boundary needs not be encoded. Its superior compression capabilities, the simplicity of its implementation, and its versatility make Edgebreaker particularly suitable for the emerging 3D data exchange standards for interactive graphic applications. The paper also offers a comparative survey of the rapidly growing field of geometric compression.

Compression, Graph Encoding, Triangle Meshes

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