Abstract
Modern GIS(Geographic Information System) application programs and simulation systems have to handle huge size of rendering data. Currently three dimensional rendering hardwares are facing a memory bus bandwidth bottleneck problem at graphics pipeline. One general solution for this problem is to compress the static three dimensional geometry using a pre-processing phase.In this paper, we present a new mesh compression/decompression algorithm for this application. Our compression algorithm decomposes a triangle mesh into a set of triangle strips and vertex chains. After decomposition, we encode vertex connectivity with entropy encoding. Our algorithm provides 32% improved compression ratio over existing ``Generalized Triangle Mesh(GTM)'' compression and supports parallel decompression. We also proposed parallelogram prediction method for vertex coordinate compression.Our experiments visualized some terrain data with our algorithm on Open Inventor and Java3D environments.