(2002-09-01) Lavu, Sridhar; Lavu, Sridhar; Digital Signal Processing (http://dsp.rice.edu/)
3D surfaces are used in applications such as animations, 3D object modeling and visualization. The geometries of such surfaces are often approximated using polygonal meshes. This thesis aims to compress 3D geometry meshes by using an algorithm based on normal meshes and the Estimation-Quantization (EQ) algorithm. Normal meshes are multilevel representations where finer level vertices lie in a direction normal to the local surface and therefore compress the vertex data to one scalar value per vertex. A mixture distribution model is used for the wavelet coefficients. The EQ algorithm uses the local neighborhood information and Rate-Distortion optimization to encode the wavelet coefficients. We achieve performance gains of 0.5-1dB compared to the zerotree coder for normal meshes.