Compression of arbitrary mesh data using subdivision surfaces

Abstract

This paper proposes a new method for mesh data compression. In this method, the original mesh is fitted by a subdivision surface. Thus, our method approximates irregular meshes to semi-regular meshes. The volume bounded by the mesh data is first partitioned into star-shaped volumes, and then each star-shaped volume is approximated. For the approximation we establish a nearly one-to-one correspondence between the resulting vertices of the subdivision surface and the vertices of the original mesh using rays emanating at a kernel point, and fit the surface by the least square method. The resulting approximated data preserves rough shape of the original mesh. Our method can be considered as an approach to a multiresolution mesh. Moreover, our method has advantages for interactively deformed meshes. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.