Wavelets on Planar Tesselations

We present a new technique for progressive approximation and compression of polygonal objects in images. Our technique uses local parameterizations defined by meshes of convex polygons in the plane. We generalize a tensor product wavelet transform to polygonal domains to perform multiresolution analysis and compression of image regions. The advantage of our technique over conventional wavelet methods is that the domain is an arbitrary tessellation rather than, for example, a uniform rectilinear grid. We expect that this technique has many applications image compression, progressive transmission, radiosity, virtual reality, and image morphing