Compression of 3D Mesh Geometry and Vertex Attributes for Mobile Graphics

This paper presents a compression scheme for mesh geometry, which is suitable for mobile graphics. The main focus is to enable real-time decoding of compressed vertex positions while providing reasonable compression ratios. Our scheme is based on local quantization of vertex positions with mesh partitioning. To prevent visual seams along the partitioning boundaries, we constrain the locally quantized cells of all mesh partitions to have the same size and aligned local axes. We propose a mesh partitioning algorithm to minimize the size of locally quantized cells, which relates to the distortion of a restored mesh. Vertex coordinates are stored in main memory and transmitted to graphics hardware for rendering in the quantized form, saving memory space and system bus bandwidth. Decoding operation is combined with model geometry transformation, and the only overhead to restore vertex positions is one matrix multiplication for each mesh partition. In our experiments, a 32-bit floating point vertex coordinate is quantized into an 8-bit integer, which is the smallest data size supported in a mobile graphics library. With this setting, the distortions of the restored meshes are comparable to 11-bit global quantization of vertex coordinates. We also apply the proposed approach to compression of vertex attributes, such as vertex normals and texture coordinates, and show that gains similar to vertex geometry can be obtained through local quantization with mesh partitioning.