Prediction-based realistic 3D model compression

The benefit of using the geometry image to represent an arbitrary 3D mesh is that the 3D mesh can be re-sampled as a completely regular structure and coded efficiently by common image compression methods. For geometry image-based 3D mesh compression, we need to code the normal-map images while coding geometry images to improve the subjective quality and realistic effects of the reconstructed model. In traditional methods, a geometry image and a normal-map image are coded independently. However a strong correlation exists between these two kinds of images, because both of them are generated from the same 3D mesh and share the same parameterization. In this paper we propose a predictive coding framework, in which the normal-map image is predicted based on the geometric correlation between them. Additionally we utilize the strong geometric correlation among three components of normal-map image to improve the predicting accuracy. The experimental results show the proposed coding framework improves the coding efficiency of normal-map image, meanwhile the realistic effect of a 3D mesh is significantly enhanced.