Data Compression of Multiresolution Surfaces

. In this paper we introduce a new compressed representation for multiresolution models (MRM) of triangulated surfaces of 3D-objects. Associated with the representation we present compression and decompression algorithms. Our representation allows us to extract the surface at variable resolution in time linear in the output size. It applies to MRMs generated by different simplification algorithms like local vertex deletion or edge and triangle collapse. The time required to transmit models over communication lines and the space needed to store the MRMs is significantly reduced. 1 Introduction and previous work Triangle meshes are one of the most popular representations of surfaces for computer graphics applications. On the one hand, rendering of triangles is widely supported by hardware and, therefore, fast. On the other hand, there is an increasing set of data acquisition techniques which generate triangle meshes as output. However, most of these techniques generate much more triangl..