Out-of-Core Progressive Lossless Compression and Selective Decompression of Large Triangle Meshes

Abstract

In this paper we propose a novel {\em out-of-core} technique for{\em progressive} lossless compression and {\em selective}decompression of 3D triangle meshes larger than main memory. Most existing compression methods, in order to optimize compression ratios, only allow {\em sequential} decompression. We develop an integrated approach that resolves the issue of so-called {\emprefix dependency} to support {\em selective} decompression, and in addition enables I/O-efficient compression, while maintaining high compression ratios. Our decompression scheme initially provides a global context of the entire mesh at a coarse resolution, and allows the user to select different {\em regions of interest} to further decompress/refine to {\bf different}levels of details, to facilitate out-of-core multiresolution rendering for interactive visual inspection. We present experimental results which show that we achieve fast compression/decompression times and low memory footprints, with compression ratios comparable to current out-of-core {\em single resolution} methods.