Progressive Geometry Compression for Interactive Browsing

Because of self-occlusion, browsing 3D objects is a typical random access problem. After compression, if only the data of visible regions under the current viewing parameter is transmitted and decoded, the network bandwidth and decoding resources can be saved. Almost all state-of-the-art mesh compression schemes do not take random access into account. A progressive geometry compression scheme based on wavelet transform, which supports interactive browsing, is proposed. The main idea is to partition the mesh into many blocks and encode the details of each block independently, and then transmit only the encoded details of visible blocks. The wavelet coefficients which represent mesh details are grouped into zerotrees, and each zerotree is compressed independently using a modified SPIHT algorithm. The experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme has achieved comparable compression efficiency with PGC, and the amount of data required to reconstruct only visible regions is about 60% of the complete bitsteam.