Progressive coding of textured 3D models

Due to the rapid development of computer and information technology, 3D modeling and rendering capabilities are becoming increasingly important in many applications, including industrial design, architecture, CAD/CAM, video games, and medical imaging. Since 3D mesh models often have the huge amount of the data, it is time-consuming to retrieve from a storage device or to download from the network. Most 3D viewing applications need to obtain the entire file of a 3D model in order to display the model, even when the user is interested only in a low-resolution version of the model. Therefore, progressive coding that enables multiresolution transmission of 3D models is desired. We propose the progressive coding scheme of 3D meshes with texture, in which we convert irregular meshes to semiregular using texture coordinates, map them on planes, and apply 2D image coding algorithm to mesh compression. As our method uses the wavelet transform, the encoded bitstream has a progressive nature. We gain high compression rate with the same visual quality as original models.