Cost-driven framework for progressive compression of textured meshes

Cédric Portaneri (1) , Pierre Alliez (1) , Michael Hemmer (2) , Lukas Birklein (3) , Elmar Schoemer (3)

1 TITANE - Geometric Modeling of 3D Environments
2 Google Inc
3 JGU - Johannes Gutenberg - Universität Mainz = Johannes Gutenberg University

Recent advances in digitization of geometry and radiometry generate in routine massive amounts of surface meshes with texture or color attributes. This large amount of data can be compressed using a progressive approach which provides at decoding low complexity levels of details (LoDs) that are continuously refined until retrieving the original model. The goal of such a progressive mesh compression algorithm is to improve the overall quality of the transmission for the user, by optimizing the rate-distortion trade-off. In this paper, we introduce a novel meaningful measure for the cost of a progressive transmission of a textured mesh by observing that the rate-distortion curve is in fact a staircase, which enables an effective comparison and optimization of progressive transmissions in the first place. We contribute a novel generic framework which utilizes the cost function to encode triangle surface meshes via multiplexing several geometry reduction steps (mesh decimation via half-edge or full-edge collapse operators, xyz quantization reduction and uv quantization reduction). This framework can also deal with textures by multiplexing an additional texture reduction step. We also design a texture atlas that enables us to preserve texture seams during decimation while not impairing the quality of resulting LODs. For encoding the inverse mesh decimation steps we further contribute a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art in terms of rate-distortion performance and yields a compression-rate of 22:1, on average. Finally, we propose a unique single-rate alternative solution using a selection scheme of a subset among LODs, optimized for our cost function, and provided with our atlas that enables interleaved progressive texture refinements.

Mots clés: CCS CONCEPTS • Computing methodologies → Computer graphics; Geometry compression; surface meshes; textures; multiplexing; adaptive quantization; progressive vs single-rate

Domaines: Géométrie algorithmique [cs.CG]

Cédric Portaneri, Pierre Alliez, Michael Hemmer, Lukas Birklein, Elmar Schoemer. Cost-driven framework for progressive compression of textured meshes. ACM 2019 - 10th Multimedia Systems Conference, Jun 2019, Amherst, United States. pp.175-188, ⟨10.1145/3304109.3306225⟩. ⟨hal-02273929⟩