A Predictor for Triangle Mesh Compression Working in Tangent Space

Abstract

Triangle mesh compression has been a popular research topic for decades. Since a plethora of algorithms has been presented, it is becoming increasingly difficult to come up with significant performance improvements. Some of the recent advances in compression efficiency come at the cost of rather steep implementation and/or computational expense, which has profound consequences on their practicality. Ultimately it becomes increasingly difficult to come up with improvements that are reasonably easy to implement and do not harm the computational efficiency of the compression/decompression procedure. In this paper, we analyze a combination of two previously known techniques, namely using the local coordinates for expressing compression residuals and weighted parallelogram prediction, which were not previously investigated together. We report that such approach outperforms industry standard Draco on a large set of test meshes in terms of rate/distortion ratio, while retaining beneficial properties such as simplicity and computational efficiency.