Triangle mesh compression for fast rendering

Abstract

Modern GIS (geographic information system) application programs and simulation systems have to handle large datasets for rendering. Currently, three dimensional rendering hardware are facing a memory bus bandwidth bottleneck problem at the graphics pipeline. One general solution for this problem is to compress the static three dimensional geometry in a preprocessing phase. We present a new mesh compression/decompression algorithm for this application. Our compression algorithm breaks down a triangle mesh into a set of triangle strips and vertex chains. After decomposition, we encode vertex connectivity with entropy encoding. Our algorithm provides a 32% improvement in the compression ratio over existing "Generalized Triangle Mesh (GTM)" compression and supports parallel decompression. We also proposed a parallelogram prediction method for vertex coordinate compression.