Mesh connectivity compression using convection reconstruction

During a highly productive period running from 1995 to about 2002, the research in lossless compression of 3D meshes mainly consisted in a hard battle for the best bitrates. But for a few years, compression rates seem stabilized around 1.5 bit per vertex for the connectivity coding of usual meshes, and more and more work is dedicated to remeshing, lossy compression, or gigantic mesh compression, where memory and CPU optimizations are the new priority. However, the size of 3D models keeps growing, and many application fields keep requiring lossless compression. In this paper, we present a new contribution for single-rate lossless connectivity compression, which first brings improvement over current state of the art bitrates, and secondly, does not constraint the coding of the vertex positions, offering therefore a good complementarity with the best performing geometric compression methods. The initial observation having motivated this work is that very often, most of the connectivity part of a mesh can be automatically deduced from its geometric part using reconstruction algorithms. This has already been used within the limited framework of projectable objects (essentially terrain models and GIS), but finds here its first generalization to arbitrary triangular meshes, without any limitation regarding the topological genus, the number of connected components, the manifoldness or the regularity. This can be obtained by constraining and guiding a Delaunay-based reconstruction algorithm so that it outputs the initial mesh to be coded. The resulting rates seem extremely competitive when the meshes are fully included in Delaunay, and are still good compared to the state of the art in the general case.