Octree-Based Progressive Geometry Encoder

Among progressive 3D mesh compression algorithms, the kd-tree-based algorithm proposed by Gandoin and Devillers [1] is one of the state-of-the-art algorithms. Based on the observation that this geometry coder has a large amount of overhead at high kd-tree levels, we propose an octree-based geometry coder that demands a less amount of coding bits at high octree levels by applying selective cell subdivision at high tree levels, leading to a better rate-distortion performance for the low bit rate coding. Experimental results show that, compared with the kd-tree-based coder, the proposed 3D geometry coder performs better for an expanded tree of a level less than or equal to 8 but slightly worse for the full tree expansion with 12-bit quantization.