Dense mesh compression

An apparatus comprising:

• a non-transitory memory for storing an application, the application for:
• performing mesh voxelization on an input mesh;
• implementing patch generation which segments the mesh into patches including a surface mesh and unprojected triangles;
• performing mesh coding on the surface mesh;
• performing triangle coding on the unprojected triangles;
• and
• generating a Visual Volumetric Video-based Compression (V3C) bitstream based on the mesh coding and the triangle coding, wherein triangle coding includes determining if a bounding box of connected components is smaller than a pre-defined area, the unprojected triangles are moved to a separate list for independent triangle coding, and the unprojected triangles are not rasterized, but coded as vertices with associated color per vertex;
• otherwise, each triangle is projected to a patch, and if a projected position of a vertex is already occupied, the triangle is encoded in another patch, so the triangle is put in a missing triangles list to be processed again later;
• and
• a processor coupled to the memory, the processor configured for processing the application.

A system comprising:

• one or more cameras for acquiring three dimensional content;
• an encoder for encoding the three dimensional content:
• performing mesh voxelization on an input mesh of the three dimensional content;
• implementing patch generation which segments the mesh into patches including a surface mesh and unprojected triangles;
• performing mesh coding on the surface mesh;
• performing triangle coding on the unprojected triangles;
• and
• generating a Visual Volumetric Video-based Compression (V3C) bitstream based on the mesh coding and the triangle coding, wherein triangle coding includes determining if a bounding box of connected components is smaller than a pre-defined area, the unprojected triangles are moved to a separate list for independent triangle coding, and the unprojected triangles are not rasterized, but coded as vertices with associated color per vertex;
• otherwise, each triangle is projected to a patch, and if a projected position of a vertex is already occupied, the triangle is encoded in another patch, so the triangle is put in a missing triangles list to be processed again later.