Geometry Compression for General Polygon Meshes

In this paper a new geometry compression algorithm for general polygon meshes is introduced. Unlike most existing algorithms for triangular meshes, the approach of the paper encodes the connectivity information of general polygon meshes by implicitly subdividing each polygon into triangles in a predefined order. Based on the coplanar characteristic of a polygon, a compression scheme for vertex coordinates is described. Both run-length encoding and arithmetic encoding are employed to achieve higher compression ratio. Experimental results show the scheme can significantly reduce the bandwidth to transfer general polygon meshes over Internet.