Compression-Domain Editing of 3D Models

3D models have become an essential element of multimedia applications because they provide visual effects that permit interactive exploration. As in other media types, efficient compression of 3D models is essential to reduce the associated storage and processing cost. Triangle mesh is the prevailing geometric representation for 3D scene models. Despite significant research on compression algorithms for triangle mesh in recent years, most 3D model editing tools still manipulate triangle meshes in their uncompressed representation. This paper presents a novel compression-domain mesh editing (CDE) technique, which supports an efficient lossless mesh compression algorithm called BFT and allows 3D models to be directly edited based on the BFTcompression form. Experimental results from real-world complex 3D models running on a fully operational CDE prototype demonstrate that compared to the editing of uncompressed triangle mesh, the CDE technique achieves a reduction in run-time memory requirements during the editing process by a factor of 14, while keeping the average edit operation latency under 2 msec regardless of the size of the 3D models.