A rendering-efficient progressive transmission of 3D meshes

We present a novel mesh representation scheme exploiting the characteristics of triangle strips, called progressives strips, which gives rendering-efficient triangulation data at the rendering stage in a graphics system such as progressive transmission where the mesh topology changes continuously. Progressive strips consist of a set of triangle strips simplified to the base mesh and a set of refinement steps required to recover incrementally the original mesh at full resolution. We also propose an improved triangle strip filtering algorithm and the encoding of strip-edge collapses in order to reduce efficiently the redundant triangles and the amount of refinement information, both of which may increase as the mesh degrades. Our approach increases the overall graphics performance by reducing the amount of data sent to the graphics pipeline.