Andrei Khodakovsky has contributed to this distributed version. A normal mesh is a multiresolution representation which has the property that all details lie in a known normal direction and hence the mesh depends only on a single scalar per vertex . Such meshes are ideally suited for progressive compression. We demonstrate such a compression algorithm for normal meshes representing complex, arbitrary topology surfaces as they appear in 3D scanning and scientific visualization. The resulting coder is shown to exhibit gains of an additional 2-5dB over the previous state of the art.
Normal meshes are new fundamental surface descriptions inspired by differential geometry.
A normal mesh is a multiresolution mesh where each level can be written as a normal offset from a coarser version. Hence the mesh can be stored with a single float per vertex. We present an algorithm to approximate any surface arbitrarily closely with a normal semi-regular mesh. Normal meshes are useful in numerous applications such as compression, filtering, rendering, texturing, and modeling. In this article we review techniques for building and analyzing wavelets on irregular point sets in one and two dimensions.