Scalable intraband wavelet-based coding scheme for irregular meshes

This paper describes a novel scalable 3D triangular mesh coding method based on wavelet transform and successive approximation quantization. The algorithm efficiently exploits the intracorrelations between wavelet coefficients independently in each subband. Non-significant wavelet coefficients are clustered, in a per bit-plane manner, by using an octree-based approach. An hierarchical bitstream is then generated allowing to gradually decode the 3D mesh at the desired quality or resolution representation. Our proposal can be executed on arbitrary topology meshes by using irregular wavelet decomposition. Objective and subjective quality evaluation on representative 3D meshes shows that the proposed codec provides competitive compression results when compared to the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, it fits well to applications that require fast interactive handling of highly detailed 3D meshes, over networks with limited and/or variable bandwidth.