SOT: Compact Representation for Triangle and Tetrahedral Meshes

The Corner Table (CT) represents a triangle mesh by storing 6 integer references per triangle (3 vertex references in the Vertex table and 3 references to opposite corners in the Opposite table, which accelerate access to adjacent triangles). The Compact Half Face (CHF) representation extends CT to tetrahedral meshes, storing 8 references per tetrahedron (4 in the Vertex table and 4 in the Opposite table). We use the term Vertex Opposite Table (VOT) to refer to both CT and CHF and propose a sorted variation, SVOT, which is inspired by tetrahedral mesh encoding techniques and which works for both triangle and tetrahedral meshes. The SVOT does not require additional storage and yet provides, for each vertex, a reference to an incident corner from which the star (incident cells) of the vertex may be traversed at a constant cost per visited element. We use the corner operators for querying and traversing the triangle meshes while for tetrahedral meshes, we propose a set of powerful wedge-based operators. Improving on the SVOT, we propose our Sorted Opposite Table (SOT) variation, which eliminates the Vertex table completely and hence reduces storage requirements by 50% to only 3 references per triangle for triangle meshes and 4 references and 9 bits per tetrahedron for tetrahedral meshes, while preserving the vertex-to-incidentcorner references and supporting the corner operators and our wedge operators with a constant average cost. The SVOT and SOT representation work on manifold meshes with boundaries.