A novel progressive mesh representation method based on the half-edge data structure and √3 subdivision

Abstract: Progressive mesh (PM) representation can perfectly meet the requirements of generating multi-resolutions for a detailed 3D model. This research proposes a new PM representation method to improve the PM representation storage efficiency and reduce PM generation time. In existing PM representation methods, more than 4 adjacent vertices will be stored for one vertex in the PM representation. Furthermore, the methods always use the inefficient vertex and face list representation during the generation process. In our proposed method, only three vertices are stored by using the √3 subdivision scheme and the efficient half-edge data structure replaces the vertex and face list representation. To evaluate the proposed method, a designed experiment is conducted by using three common testing 3D models. The result illustrates the improvements by comparing to other previous methods.