3D meshes are commonly used to represent virtual surface and volumes. However, their raw data representations take a large amount of space. Hence, 3D mesh compression has been an active research topic since the mid 1990s. In 2005, two very good review articles describing the pioneering works were published. Yet, new technologies have emerged since then. In this article, we summarize the early works and put the focus on these novel approaches. We classify and describe the algorithms, evaluate their performance, and provide synthetic comparisons. We also outline the emerging trends for future research.

3D Mesh Compression: Survey, Comparisons, and Emerging Trends

3DHOP: 3D Heritage Online Presenter

http://alunevans.info/publications/computers_and_graphics_3d_web_survey_final_preprint.pdf

3D graphics on the web: A survey

http://www.gipsa-lab.grenoble-inp.fr/~kai.wang/papers/CG12.pdf

Technical Section: A fast roughness-based approach to the assessment of 3D mesh visual quality

Almost all mesh processing procedures cause some more or less visible changes in the appearance of objects represented by polygonal meshes In many cases, such as mesh watermarking, simplification or lossy compression, the objective is to make the change in appearance negligible, or as small as possible, given some other constraints Measuring the amount of distortion requires taking into account the final purpose of the data In many applications, the final consumer of the data is a human observer, and therefore the perceptibility of the introduced appearance change by a human observer should be the criterion that is taken into account when designing and configuring the processing algorithms In this review, we discuss the existing comparison metrics for static and dynamic (animated) triangle meshes We describe the concepts used in perception-oriented metrics used for 2D image comparison, and we show how these concepts are employed in existing 3D mesh metrics We describe the character of subjective data used for evaluation of mesh metrics and provide comparison results identifying the advantages and drawbacks of each method Finally, we also discuss employing the perception-correlated metrics in perception-oriented mesh processing algorithms

/pdf/perceptual-metrics-for-static-and-dynamic-triangle-meshes-2p71ikqyee.pdf

Perceptual metrics for static and dynamic triangle meshes

We propose a new lossless progressive compression algorithm based on rate-distortion optimization for meshes with color attributes; the quantization precision of both the geometry and the color information is adapted to each intermediate mesh during the encoding/decoding process. This quantization precision can either be optimally determined with the use of a mesh distortion measure or quasi-optimally decided based on an analysis of the mesh complexity in order to reduce the calculation time. Furthermore, we propose a new metric which estimates the geometry and color importance of each vertex during the simplification in order to faithfully preserve the feature elements. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm for colored meshes and competes with the most efficient algorithms for non-colored meshes.

/pdf/rate-distortion-optimization-for-progressive-compression-of-3lqd1mle57.pdf

Rate-distortion optimization for progressive compression of 3D mesh with color attributes

This paper presents a framework, integrated into the X3D file format, for the streaming of 3D content in the context of remote scientific visualization; a progressive mesh compression method is proposed that can handle 3D objects associated with attributes like colors, while producing high quality intermediate Levels Of Detail (LOD). Efficient adaptation mechanisms are also proposed so as to optimize the LOD management of the 3D scene according to different constraints like the network bandwidth, the device graphic capability, the display resolution and the user preferences. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency of our approach in scientific visualization scenarii.

Remote scientific visualization of progressive 3D meshes with X3D

A new reversible 3D mesh watermarking scheme is proposed in conjunction with progressive compression. Progressive 3D mesh compression permits a progressive refinement of the model from a coarse to a fine representation by using different levels of detail (LoDs). A reversible watermark is embedded into all refinement levels such that (1) the refinement levels are copyright protected, and (2) an authorized user is able to reconstruct the original 3D model after watermark extraction, hence reversible. The progressive compression considers a connectivity-driven algorithm to choose the vertices that are to be refined for each LoD. The proposed watermarking algorithm modifies the geometry information of these vertices based on histogram bin shifting technique. An authorized user can extract the watermark in each LoD and recover the original 3D mesh, while an unauthorized user which has access to the decompression algorithm can only reconstruct a distorted version of the 3D model. Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust to several attack scenarios while maintaining a good compression ratio.

Joint reversible watermarking and progressive compression of 3D meshes

We propose a new connectivity-based progressive compression approach for triangle meshes. The key idea is to adapt the quantization precision to the resolution of each intermediate mesh so as to optimize the rate-distortion trade-off. This adaptation is automatically determined during the encoding process and the overhead is efficiently encoded using geometrical prediction techniques. We also introduce an optimization of the geometry coding by using a bijective discrete rotation. Results show that our approach delivers a better rate-distortion behavior than both connectivity-based and geometry-based compression state of the art methods.

Adaptive coarse-to-fine quantization for optimizing rate-distortion of progressive mesh compression

In this paper, we present two methods to compress colored 3D triangular meshes in a progressive way. Although many progressive algorithms exist for efficient encoding of connectivity and geometry, none of these techniques consider the color data in spite of its considerable size. Based on the powerful progressive algorithm from Alliez and Desbrun [All01a], we propose two extensions for progressive encoding and reconstruction of vertex colors: a prediction-based method and a mapping table method. In the first one, after transforming the initial RGB space into the Lab space, each vertex color is predicted by a specific scheme using information of its neighboring vertices. The second method considers a mapping table with reduced number of possible colors in order to improve the rate-distortion tradeoff. Results show that the prediction method produces quite good results even in low resolutions, while the mapping table method delivers similar visual results but with a fewer amount of bits transmitted depending on the color complexity of the model.

/pdf/new-methods-for-progressive-compression-of-colored-3d-mesh-ovx91twhfo.pdf

Ho Lee

Papers

Rate-distortion optimization for progressive compression of 3D mesh with color attributes

Remote scientific visualization of progressive 3D meshes with X3D

Joint reversible watermarking and progressive compression of 3D meshes

Adaptive coarse-to-fine quantization for optimizing rate-distortion of progressive mesh compression

New methods for progressive compression of colored 3D Mesh