A novel progressive lossy-to-lossless coding method for mesh models of images

A novel progressive lossy-to-lossless coding method is proposed for mesh models of images whose underlying triangulations have arbitrary connectivity. For a triangulation T of a set P of points, our proposed method represents the connectivity of T as a sequence of edge flips that maps a uniquely-determined Delaunay triangulation of P to T. The coding efficiency of our method is highest when the underlying triangulation connectivity is close to Delaunay, and slowly degrades as connectivity moves away from being Delaunay. Experimental results show our method to significantly outperform a simple baseline coding scheme and suggest our method to be superior to more traditional coding approaches for meshes whose connectivity does not deviate too far from being Delaunay.