Effects of Noise on Quantized Triangle Meshes

In this paper we measure the effects of noise on the performance of a standard entropy compression algorithm for quantized triangle meshes. In a first experiment, we show that a small amount of added noise may lead to slightly smaller filesizes. The magnitude of stochastic resonance is too small to have any practical applications in mesh compression. In a second experiment, we study the effect of a fixed amount of added noise on different levels of quantization. The results show that the effect of the added noise does not increase monotonically with the level of quantization. These two phenomena have implications in the design of validation experiments for mesh processing algorithms. They show that the tacit assumption that the effects of added noise increase monotonically with the amount of noise and with the level of quantization can be wrong.