The recent growth in the size and availability of large triangular surface models has generated interest in compact multi-resolution progressive representation and data transmission. An ongoing challenge is to design an efficient data structure that encompasses both compactness of geometric representations and visual quality of progressive representations. We introduce a topological layering based data structure and an encoding scheme to build a compact progressive representation of an arbitrary triangular mesh (a 2D simplicial complex in 3D) with attached attribute data. This compact representation is composed of multiple levels of detail that can be progressively transmitted and displayed. The global topology, which is the number of holes and connected components, can be flexibly changed among successive levels while still achieving guaranteed size of the coarsest level mesh for very complex models. The flexibility in our encoding scheme also allows topology preserving progressivity.
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