Compressed representation of changing meshes and method to decompress

Abstract

A computer implemented representation and a method for encoding and decoding sequences of changes of a manifold triangular mesh. The representation is composed of a base manifold triangular mesh and a succession of specialized mesh surgery operations that may be of a different type. The methods encode or decode any sequence of mark, move, cut, delete, close, fill, or add operations. The mark operation specifies a type of mark and a set of marked elements. The move operation determines a set of displaced vertices from a set of marked elements, and applies a set of vertex displacements to the set of displaced vertices. The cut operation cuts the changing mesh through a set of marked edges. The close operation is applied to one or more boundaries that are determined when the type of mark is a boundary type, and the one or more boundaries are determined by a marked elements variable. The fill operation adds the triangles of a simple polygon to a manifold triangular mesh by establishing a one to one correspondence between a contiguous subset of boundary edges of the manifold triangular mesh and the same number of contiguous edges of a loop defined by the boundary of the simple polygon. The add operation is preferably specified by an incremental manifold triangular mesh and a sequence of stitches, where the incremental manifold triangular mesh is a manifold triangular mesh, and where a stitch is a one to one correspondence between a contiguous subset of boundary edges of one boundary of the manifold triangular mesh and the same number of contiguous edges of boundary edges of one boundary of the incremental manifold triangular mesh.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.