Tetrahedral Mesh Compression

In the last years, substantial progress has been achieved in the area of volume visualization on irregular grids, which is mainly based on tetrahedral meshes. No attempts have been made so far to compress tetrahedral meshes losslessly, although this is especially important for scientific applications since even moderately fine meshes consume several mega-bytes of storage. In this paper we close this gap and present compression and decompression algorithms, which reduce the storage space required for the connectivity to few bits per tetrahedron. Thus a tetrahedral mesh can almost be reduce to the vertex coordinates, that consume in a common representation about one quarter of the total storage space. We introduce and analyze the generalization of several triangle mesh compression algorithms to the tetrahedral case. We show that the implemented approach achieves the highest compression rates. We round off our work with solutions for the compression of vertex coordinates and additional attributes, which might be attached to the mesh. CR Categories: I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Geometry and Object Modeling—object representations I.3.6 [Computer Graphics]: Methodology and Techniques—Graphics data structures and data types E.4 [E.4 Coding and Information Theory]: Data compaction and compression