Edgebreaker: a simple compression for surfaces with handles

Abstract

The Edgebreaker is an efficient scheme for compressing triangulated surfaces. A surprisingly simple implementation of Edgebreaker has been proposed for surfaces homeomorphic to a sphere. It uses the Corner-Table data structure, which represents the connectivity of a triangulated surface by two tables of integers, and encodes them with less than 2 bits per triangle. We extend this simple formulation to deal with triangulated surfaces with handles and present the detailed pseudocode for the encoding and decoding algorithms (which take one page each). We justify the validity of the proposed approach using the mathematical formulation of the Handlebody theory for surfaces, which explains the topological changes that occur when two boundary edges of a portion of a surface are identified.