Triangle Mesh Compression for Fast Rendering

Modern GIS(Geographic Information System) applica-tion programs and simulation systems have to handle large datasets for rendering. Currently three dimensional render-ing hardware are facing a memory bus bandwidth bottle-neck problem at the graphics pipeline. One general solution for this problem is to compress the static three dimensional geometry in a preprocessing phase. We present a new mesh compression/decompression al-gorithm for this application. Our compression algorithm breaks down a triangle mesh into a set of triangle strips and vertex chains. After decomposition, we encode vertex connectivity with entropy encoding. Our algorithm provides a 32 % improvement in the compression ratio over existing “Generalized Triangle Mesh(GTM) ” compression and sup-ports parallel decompression. We also proposed a paral-lelogram prediction method for vertex coordinate compres-sion. 1