Geometry images

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 alg...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: TOG
• Authors: Xianfeng Gu, Steven J. Gortler, Hugues Hoppe
• Keywords: Geometry Images, Simple 2D Array, Surface Geometry, TOG 2002