Region-based 3D mesh compression using an efficient neighborhood-based segmentation

Due to the popularity of polygonal models in Virtual Reality applications, three-dimensional (3D) mesh compression and segmentation are two active areas of 3D object modeling. Most existing 3D compression algorithms compress the whole object to reduce the local storage requirement and the delays in transmitting objects over the Internet. However, in some interactive applications, the client may be interested in particular section(s) of the object. The server needs to segment the object into parts and send them individually or sequentially. This paper presents a segmentation-based 3D mesh compression scheme that can meet this requirement. We propose an efficient eXtended Multi-Ring neighborhood-(XMR) based 3D mesh segmentation algorithm that decomposes the object into meaningful regions. We then compress them separately and put them into one stream. The common boundary triangles that will be used for sticking the regions together are processed and appended to the end of the stream. This is referred to as a region-conquer-and-stitch scheme.