Wrap&Zip decompression of the connectivity of triangle meshes compressed with Edgebreaker

The Edgebreaker compression (Rossignac, 1999; King and Rossignac, 1999) is guaranteed to encode any unlabeled triangulated planar graph of t triangles with at most 1.84t bits. It stores the graph as a CLERS string--- a sequence of t symbols from the set {C, L,E,R,S}, each represented by a 1, 2 or 3 bit code. We show here that, in practice, the string can be further compressed to between 0.91t and 1.26t bits using an entropy code. These results improve over the 2.3t bits code proposed by Keeler and Westbrook (1995) and over the various 3D triangle mesh compression techniques published recently (Gumhold and Strasser, 1998; Itai and Rodeh, 1982; Naor, 1990; Touma and Gotsman, 1988; Turan, 1984), which exhibit either larger constants or cannot guarantee a linear worst case storage complexity. The decompression proposed by Rossignac (1999) is complicated and exhibits a non-linear time complexity. The main contribution reported here is a simpler and efficient decompression algorithm, calle..