Reversible variable length codes (RVLC) for robust coding of 3D topological mesh data

Summary form only given. In order to limit error propagation, we divide the topological data of the entire mesh into several segments. Each segment is identified by its synchronization word and header. Due to the use of the arithmetic coder, data of a whole segment would often become useless in the presence of even a single bit error. Furthermore, several adjacent segments may be corrupted simultaneously at high bit error rates (BER). As a result, a lot of data would be required to be retransmitted in the presence of errors. Retransmitted data may also in turn get corrupted in high BER conditions. This would result in a considerable loss of coding efficiency and increased delay. We propose the use of reversible variable length codes (RVLC) to solve this problem. RVLC not only prevents error propagation in one segment but also efficiently detects the distorted portion of the bitstream due to their capability of two-way decoding. This would allow the recovery of a large portion of data from a corrupted segment. The amount of retransmitted data can thus be drastically reduced. RVLC can be matched to various sources with different probability distributions by adjusting their suffix length, and have been found suitable for image and video coding. However, the application of RVLC to robust 3D mesh coding has not yet been studied. Our study of the suitability of RVLC for the topological data is presented in this research. Experiments have been carried to prove the efficiency of the proposed robust 3D graphic coding algorithm. To design an efficient pre-defined code table, a large set of 300 MPEG-4 selected 3D models have been used in our experiments. The use of predefined code tables would result in a significantly reduced computational complexity.