Shape compression using spherical geometry images

Abstract: We recently introduced an algorithm for spherical parametrization and remeshing, which allows resampling of a genus-zero surface onto a regular 2D grid, a spherical geometry image. These geometry images offer several advantages for shape compression. First, simple extension rules extend the square image domain to cover the infinite plane, thereby providing a globally smooth surface parametrization. The 2D grid structure permits use of ordinary image wavelets, including higher-order wavelets with polynomial precision. The coarsest wavelets span the entire surface and thus encode the lowest frequencies of the shape. Finally, the compression and decompression algorithms operate on ordinary 2D arrays, and are thus ideally suited for hardware acceleration. In this paper, we detail two wavelet-based approaches for shape compression using spherical geometry images, and provide comparisons with previous compression schemes.