A distance-based compression of 3D meshes for mobile devices

We present a new 3D mesh codec for mobile devices. Mobile devices have limited resources such as low memory, slow CPU speed, low power, and no floating-point processor. Considering these mobile characteristics, we suggest a new approach: a hybrid of a progressive geometry and a single-rate connectivity coding. By this approach, our algorithm achieves fast visual updates of progressive 3D point clouds on a small screen of a mobile device and later finalizes restoring faces of the mesh without intensive computing. For a progressive geometry coding, an octree is created and coded. For a single-rate connectivity coding, a new distance based algorithm is introduced. Our algorithm uses only fixed-point arithmetic with simple data structures. Our new 3D mesh codec has been tested on a real mobile phone and the statistical and visual results are also presented in this paper.