An Efficient Compression Method for Triangular Meshes Used in Engineering

This paper presents a new approach for the lossless compression of engineering data, represented by triangles. The method works in two steps a topology compression followed by an entropy compression. The topology compression is based on the five states; one is automatically recognized by the compressor/decompressor and the remaining is coded by four commands. This approach for topology compression has been compared with other methods and turns out to be highly competitive. Geometric data and application-specific engineering data are also prepared for compression during the topology compression. Namely, the compressed topological data contributes just a few percent to the normal size of the geometric and application-specific data. General purpose compression methods are usually used for these. We compared our method with the popular PkZip and we achieved considerably better results. Key-Words: FEM triangular mesh, compression, topology, geometry