SQUEEZE: Fast and Progressive Decompression of Triangle Meshes

An ideal triangle mesh compression technology would simultaneously support the following three objectives: (1) progressive refinements of the received mesh during decompression, (2) nearly optimal compression ratios for both geometry and connectivity, and (3) in-line, real-time decompression algorithms for hardware or software implementations. Because these three objectives impose contradictory constraints, previously reported efforts focus primarily on one – sometimes two – of these objectives. The SQUEEZE technique introduced here addresses all three constraints simultaneously, and attempts to provide the best possible compromise. For a mesh of T triangles, SQUEEZE compresses the connectivity to 3.7T bits, which is competitive with the best progressive compression techniques reported so far. The geometry prediction error encoding technique introduced here leads to 20% improved geometry compression over previous schemes. Our initial implementation on a 300 Mhz CPU achieves a decompression rate of up to 46’000 triangles per second. SQUEEZE downloads a model through a number of successive refinement stages, providing the benefit of progressivity.