State of the art in geometry compression

Very large 3D models documenting architectural designs, heritage monuments, power plants and mechanical CAD designs are being increasingly deployed in various applications involving interactive visualization and network-based access. More often than not, the complexity of these 3D models far exceeds the limits of what can be quickly downloaded at popular connection speeds and what can be easily stored and rendered for interactive exploration on personal desktops, even when additionally fitted with affordable 3D acceler-ator hardware. Compression schemes for such very large 3D geo-metric models have thus become a subject of intense study in recent years. In this report, we present: (a) an overview of the state of the art in compression of 3D polygonal models, (b) a classification scheme for large 3D polygonal models, (c) a classification of strategies for compression of these models, (d) a scheme for evaluation of geome-try compression algorithms, and (e) a detailed survey of the relevant work reported in the literature till date.