Abstract
An isosurface extraction algorithm which can directly generate compressed representation from volume data is introduced. We propose a hierarchical coding scheme to reduce the number of bits of geometry and connectivity data. By exploiting the geometry property of Marching Cubes algorithm[1][2], our algorithm can produce compressed stream data along with the isosurface construction. Consequently, the indirectly compression can be avoided. Theoretical analysis and empirical tests are given to show that our compression ratio is better than indirect approach with existing mesh compression algorithm. Moreover,our decompression algorithm is much faster than existing ones and requires only a small amount of working buffer. In other words, it is very suitable for online-application.