SOT: compact representation for tetrahedral meshes

Abstract

The Corner Table (CT) promoted by Rossignac et al. provides a simple and efficient representation of triangle meshes, storing 6 integer references per triangle (3 vertex references in the V table and 3 references to opposite corners in the O table that accelerate access to adjacent triangles). The Compact Half Face (CHF) proposed by Lage et al. extends CT to tetrahedral meshes, storing 8 references per tetrahedron (4 in the V table and 4 in the O table). We call it the Vertex Opposite Table (VOT) and propose a sorted variation, SVOT, which does not require any additional storage and yet provides, for each vertex, a reference to an incident corner from which an incident tetrahedron may be recovered and the star of the vertex may be traversed at a constant cost per visited element. We use a set of powerful wedge-based operators for querying and traversing the mesh. Finally, inspired by tetrahedral mesh encoding techniques used by Weiler et al. and by Szymczak and Rossignac, we propose our Sorted O Table (SOT) variation, which eliminates the V table completely and hence reduces storage requirements by 50% to only 4 references and 9 bits per tetrahedron, while preserving the vertex-to-incident-corner references and supporting our wedge operators with a linear average cost.