Valence-driven connectivity encoding for 3D meshes

In this paper, we propose a valence-driven, single-resolution encoding technique for lossless compression of triangle mesh connectivity. Building upon a valence-based approach pioneered by Touma and Gotsman, we design a new valence-driven conquest for arbitrary meshes that always guarantees smaller compression rates than the original method. Furthermore, we provide a novel theoretical entropy study of our technique, hinting the optimality of the valence-driven approach. Finally, we demonstrate the practical efficiency of this approach (in agreement with the theoretical prediction) on a series of test meshes, resulting in the lowest compression ratios published so far, for both irregular and regular meshes, small or large.