Geometry images

  • Authors:

  • Xianfeng Gu;Steven J. Gortler;Hugues Hoppe

  • Affiliations:

  • Harvard University;Harvard University;Microsoft Research

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 29th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Surface geometry is often modeled with irregular triangle meshes. The process of remeshing refers to approximating such geometry using a mesh with (semi)-regular connectivity, which has advantages for many graphics applications. However, current techniques for remeshing arbitrary surfaces create only semi-regular meshes. The original mesh is typically decomposed into a set of disk-like charts, onto which the geometry is parametrized and sampled. In this paper, we propose to remesh an arbitrary surface onto a completely regular structure we call a geometry image. It captures geometry as a simple 2D array of quantized points. Surface signals like normals and colors are stored in similar 2D arrays using the same implicit surface parametrization --- texture coordinates are absent. To create a geometry image, we cut an arbitrary mesh along a network of edge paths, and parametrize the resulting single chart onto a square. Geometry images can be encoded using traditional image compression algorithms, such as wavelet-based coders.