Connectivity compression for triangle meshes

Triangle mesh is one of the important representations of 3-Dimension geometry and is broadly used in computer animation, and computer game. To efficiently represent and transmit the 3-D graphics, geometry compression is introduced to reduce the volume of geometric data. Connectivity compression is an important component of all geometry compression algorithms. In this paper, the relations between vertices of a triangle mesh are maintained by an adjacency matrix, based on which a connectivity coding strategy for 2-manifold triangle meshes is proposed. With this method, all the triangles in a mesh can be organized into a set of star strips which may be represented by a binary bit stream. The connectivity of a triangle mesh is encoded with no loss of information to an average of less then two bits per triangle. If the binary bit stream is compressed further by entropy coding using, less one bit per triangle can be reached.