Edgebreaker is a simple scheme for compressing the triangle/vertex incidence graphs (sometimes called connectivity or topology) of three-dimensional triangle meshes. Edgebreaker improves upon the worst case storage required by previously reported schemes, most of which require O(nlogn) bits to store the incidence graph of a mesh of n triangles. Edgebreaker requires only 2n bits or less for simple meshes and can also support fully general meshes by using additional storage per handle and hole. Edgebreaker's compression and decompression processes perform the same traversal of the mesh from one triangle to an adjacent one. At each stage, compression produces an op-code describing the topological relation between the current triangle and the boundary of the remaining part of the mesh. Decompression uses these op-codes to reconstruct the entire incidence graph. Because Edgebreaker's compression and decompression are independent of the vertex locations, they may be combined with a variety of vertex-compressing techniques that exploit topological information about the mesh to better estimate vertex locations. Edgebreaker may be used to compress the connectivity of an entire mesh bounding a 3D polyhedron or the connectivity of a triangulated surface patch whose boundary needs not be encoded. Its superior compression capabilities, the simplicity of its implementation, and its versatility make Edgebreaker particularly suitable for the emerging 3D data exchange standards for interactive graphic applications. The paper also offers a comparative survey of the rapidly growing field of geometric compression.

This paper describes new methods for maintaining a point-location data structure for a dynamically-changing monotone subdivision S. The main approach is based on the maintenance of two interlaced spanning trees, one for S and one for the graphtheoretic planar dual of S. Queries are answered by using a centroid decomposition of the dual tree to drive searches in the primal tree. These trees are maintained via the link-cut trees structure of Sleator and Tarjan, leading to a scheme that achieves vertex insertion/deletion in O(log n) time, insertion/deletion of k-edge monotone chains in O(log n + k) time, and answers queries in O(log 2 n) time, with O(n) space, where n is the current size of subdivision S. The techniques described also allow for the dual operations expand and contract to be implemented in O(log n) time, leading to an improved method for spatial point-location in a 3-dimensional convex subdivision. In addition, the interlaced-tree approach is applied to on-line point-lo...

The Edgebreaker compression (Rossignac, 1999; King and Rossignac, 1999) is guaranteed to encode any unlabeled triangulated planar graph of t triangles with at most 1.84t bits. It stores the graph as a CLERS string--- a sequence of t symbols from the set {C, L,E,R,S}, each represented by a 1, 2 or 3 bit code. We show here that, in practice, the string can be further compressed to between 0.91t and 1.26t bits using an entropy code. These results improve over the 2.3t bits code proposed by Keeler and Westbrook (1995) and over the various 3D triangle mesh compression techniques published recently (Gumhold and Strasser, 1998; Itai and Rodeh, 1982; Naor, 1990; Touma and Gotsman, 1988; Turan, 1984), which exhibit either larger constants or cannot guarantee a linear worst case storage complexity. The decompression proposed by Rossignac (1999) is complicated and exhibits a non-linear time complexity. The main contribution reported here is a simpler and efficient decompression algorithm, calle...

We give new methods for maintaining a data structure that supports ray shooting and shortest path queries in a dynamically-changing connected planar subdivision S. Our approach is based on a new dynamic method for maintaining a balanced decomposition of a simple polygon via geodesic triangles. We maintain such triangulations by viewing their dual trees as balanced trees. We show that rotations in these trees can be implemented via a simple "diagonal swapping" operation performed on the corresponding geodesic triangles, and that edge insertion and deletion can be implemented on these trees using operations akin to the standard split and splice operations. We also maintain a dynamic point location structure on the geodesic triangulation, so that we may implement ray shooting queries by first locating the ray's endpoint and then walking along the ray from geodesic triangle to geodesic triangle until we hit the boundary of some region of S. The shortest path between two points in the same ...

Abstract-In this paper, we present an algorithm for hidden surface removal for a class of poly-hedral surfaces which have a property that they can be ordered relatively quickly. For example, our results apply directly to terrain maps. A distinguishing feature of our algorithm is that its running time is sensitive to the actual size of the visible image, rather than the total number of intersections in the image plaue which can be much larger than the visible image. The time complexity of this algorithm is O((k + n) log ’ n) where n and /c are, respectively, the input and the output sizes. Thus, in a significant number of situations this will be faster than the worst case optimal algorithms which have running time of n(n’) irrespective of the output size.

We investigate 3-d visibility problems in which the viewing position moves along a straight flightpath. Specifically we focus on two problems: determining the points along the flightpath at which the topology of the viewed scene changes, and answering ray-shooting queries for rays with origin on the flightpath. Three progressively more specialized problems are considered: general scenes, terrains, and terrains with vertical flightpaths. 1.

In this paper a dynamic technique for locating a point in a monotone planar subdivision, whose current number of vertices is n, is presented. The (complete set of) update operations are insertion of a point on an edge and of a chain of edges between two vertices, and their reverse operations. The data structure uses space O(n). The query time is O(log n), the time for insertion/deletion of a point is O(log n), and the time for insertion/deletion of a chain with k edges is O(log n + k), all worst-case. The technique is conceptually a special case of the chain method of Lee and Preparata and uses the same query algorithm. The emergence of full dynamic capabilities is afforded by a subtle choice of the chain set (separators), which induces a total order on the set of regions of the planar subdivision.

Abstract. Parallel algorithms for several graph and geometric problems are presented, including transitive closure and topological sorting in planar st-graphs, preprocessing planar subdivisions for point location queries, and construction of visibility representations and drawings of planar graphs. Most of these algorithms achieve optimal O(log n) running time using n = log n processors in the EREW PRAM model, n being the number of vertices. Key words. parallel algorithms, parallel computation, graph algorithms, planar st-graphs, transitive closure, reachability, planar point location, computational geometry, fractional cascading, graph drawing, visibility AMS(MOS) subject classi cations. 68E05, 68C05, 68C25 1. Introduction. Planar st-graphs

Given a collection S of n line segments in the plane, the planar point location problem is to construct a data structure that can efficiently determine for a given query point p the first segment(s) in S intersected by vertical rays emanating out from p. It is well known that linear-space data structures can be constructed so as to achieve O(log n) query times. But applications, such as those common in geographic information systems, motivate a re-examination of this problem with the goal of improving query times further while also simplifying the methods needed to achieve such query times. In this paper we perform such a re-examination, focusing on the issues that arise in three different classes of pointlocation query sequences: ffl sequences that are reasonably uniform spatially and temporally (in which case the constant factors in the query times become critical), ffl sequences that are non-uniform spatially or temporally (in which case one desires data structures that adapt to s...

In this paper we show how a theorem in plane geometry can be converted into an O(n log n) algorithm for decomposing a polygon into star-shaped subsets. The computational efficiency or this new decomposition contrasts with the heavy computational burden of existing methods. 1.0 Introduction The decomposition of a simple planar polygon into simpler components plays an important role in syntactic pattern recognition. Some examples of possible decompositions are decompositions into convex polygons [1], [2], decompositions into spiral polygons [3] and decompositions into monotone polygons [4]. A survey of these methods and many other additional references are contained in Pavlidis [5]. A star-shaped polygon is one in which the entire polygon is visible from at least one fixed point of the polygon. In this note we consider decompositions into star-shaped polygons and give an efficient algorithm for this problem. A similar decomposition has previously been suggested by Maruyama [6] in his th...