Progressive 3D mesh compression: A B-Spline approach

This paper proposes a new approach for efficient progressive compression of dense and smooth 3D meshes. Based on a multi-patch B-Spline representation, the proposed compression scheme includes three stages: mesh segmentation into patches, parameterization, and B-Spline fitting. The geometry images of the B-Splines control points are compressed with optimized still image encoders, while the mesh connectivity is lossless encoded by applying the Touma and Gotsman (TG) algorithm. The experimental evaluation, carried out on a corpus of meshes from the Stanford and Cyberware repositories, shows that the proposed compression scheme achieves significant gains (30% on average) when compared to the spectral compression (SC) approach and outperforms both MPEG-4 and TG encoding schemes, particularly at low bitrates of less than 8 bits per vertex.