Progressive Compression of 3D Mesh Geometry Using Sparse Approximations from Redundant Frame Dictionaries

In this paper, we present a new approach for the progressive compression of three-dimensional (3D) mesh geometry using redundant frame dictionaries and sparse approximation techniques. We construct the proposed frames from redundant linear combinations of the eigenvectors of a combinatorial mesh Laplacian matrix. We achieve a sparse synthesis of the mesh geometry by selecting atoms from a frame using matching pursuit. Experimental results show that the resulting ratedistortion performance compares favorably with other progressive mesh compression algorithms in the same category, even when a very simple, sub-optimal encoding strategy is used for the transmitted data. The proposed frames also have the desirable property of being able to be applied directly to a manifold mesh having arbitrary topology and connectivity types; thus, no initial remeshing is required and the original mesh connectivity is preserved.