TFAN: A low complexity 3D mesh compression algorithm

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel approach for mono-resolution 3D mesh compression, called TFAN (Triangle Fan-based compression). TFAN treats in a unified manner meshes of arbitrary topologies, i.e., manifold or not, oriented or not, while offering a linear computational complexity (with respect to the number of mesh vertices) for both encoding and decoding algorithms. In addition, the TFAN compressed representation is optimized for real-time decoding applications. In order to validate the proposed approach, two databases have been considered for experimentations. The first is the MPEG-4 test set, which includes over 3500 general purpose manifold meshes. The second, related to the French national project SEMANTIC-3D, includes over 4000 computer assisted design (CAD) meshes of highly irregular, non-manifold topologies. In both cases, the TFAN approach outperforms existing techniques such as MPEG-4/3DMC (3D Mesh Coding) or Touma and Gotsman, with decoding times lower by an order of magnitude at equivalent or even better levels of compression efficiency (W10% in bitrate). In addition, when applied to non-manifold 3D data, the compression performances are significantly enhanced (6-30% gain in bitrate). Due to its high compression performances the TFAN approach has been recently retained for ISO standardization, within the framework of the MPEG-4/AFX standard.

Objective and subjective quality assessment of geometry compression of reconstructed 3D humans in a 3D virtual room

“…The current standard for mesh geometry compression can be found as MPEG-4 part 16 Animated Frameworks Extension (AFX), which is part of MPEG-4 (ISO/IEC 14496). The algorithm behind the latest and most efficient compression profile TFAN was presented in [6]. In addition, there is an open source version of the reference software available at http://www.mymultimediaworld.com/.…”

Dynamic adaptive mesh streaming for real-time 3D teleimmersion

“…Alternatively, some approaches to TVM compression have attempted to detect correlations over time and encode these in a continuous data stream. For the first case, the research community has presented many efficient and mature algorithms with the state of the art being [Mamou et al 2009]; other mature works include [Rossignac 1999] and [Coors and Rossignac 2004]. On the other hand, temporally based TVM compression schemes are not yet mature enough to support realtime TI systems.…”

Source coding for transmission of reconstructed dynamic geometry: a rate-distortion-complexity analysis of different approaches

“…It has been important enough that specific ISO standards have been developed in the MPEG working group such as TFAN [6] and SVA [7] for static mesh objects and AFX FAMC [8] for animations representing meshes with a fixed connectivity and time varying geometry. These technologies are currently part of the MPEG-4 standard, and have been introduced fairly recently, superseding previous mesh codecs in MPEG-4, that did not address specific requirements such as fast decoding and an efficient handling of non-manifolds mesh models.…”

“…The decomposition of the mesh in triangle fans results in overlapping triangles between fans. In Fig 4 we show an example triangle fan as it is detected in [6], in this case the blue triangles in the TFAN are "non-visited", while the purple ones are "visited" as they occurred in a previously coded fan The key to TFAN is the detection definition of 9 different configurations and their relative frequency of occurrence. Based on this, coding bits can be efficiently allocated.…”