Compression of Normal Vectors using Octree Encoding

Three-dimensional mesh models have been widely used in various applications such as simulations, animations, and e-catalogs. In such applications the normal vectors of mesh models are used mainly for shading and take up the major portion of data size and transmission time paper over networks. Therefore a variety of techniques have been developed to compress them efficiently. In this paper, we propose the MOEC (Modified Octree Encoding Compression) algorithm, which allow multi lever compression ratios for 3D mesh models. In the algorithm, a modified octree has nodes representing their own positions and supporting a depth of the tree so that the normal vectors are compressed up to levels where the shading is visually indistinguishable. This approach provides efficient in compressing normals with multi-level ratios, without additional encoding when changing in compression ratio is required.