We consider the design of fast and compact representations of the connectivity information of triangle meshes. Although traditional data structures (Half-Edge, Corner Table) are fast and user-friendly, they tend to be memory-expensive. On the other hand, compression schemes, while meeting information-theoretic lower bounds, do not support navigation within the mesh structure. Compact representations provide an advantageous balance for representing large meshes, enabling a judicious compromise between memory consumption and fast implementation of navigational operations. We propose new representations that are sensitive to the regularity of the graph while still having worst case guarantees. For all our data structures we have both an interesting storage cost, typically 2 or 3 r.p.v. (references per vertex) in the case of very regular triangulations, and provable upper bounds in the worst case scenario. One of our solutions has a worst case cost of 3.33 r.p.v., which is currently the best-known bound improving the previous 4 r.p.v. [Castelli et al. 2018]. Our representations have slightly slower running times (factors 1.5 to 4) than classical data structures. In our experiments we compare on various meshes runtime and memory performance of our representations with those of the most efficient existing solutions.

We consider the problem of computing a spherical crossing-free geodesic drawing of a planar graph: this problem, as well as the closely related spherical parameterization problem, has attracted a lot of attention in the last two decades both in theory and in practice, motivated by a number of applications ranging from texture mapping to mesh remeshing and morphing. Our main concern is to design and implement a linear time algorithm for the computation of spherical drawings provided with theoretical guarantees. While not being aesthetically pleasing, our method is extremely fast and can be used as initial placer for spherical iterative methods and spring embedders. We provide experimental comparison with initial placers based on planar Tutte parameterization. Finally we explore the use of spherical drawings as initial layouts for (Euclidean) spring embedders: experimental evidence shows that this greatly helps to untangle the layout and to reach better local minima.

Schnyder woods are a well known combinatorial structure for planar graphs, which yields a decomposition into 3 vertexspanning trees. Our goal is to extend definitions and algorithms for Schnyder woods designed for planar graphs (corresponding to combinatorial surfaces with the topology of the sphere, i.e., of genus 0) to the more general case of graphs embedded on surfaces of arbitrary genus. First, we define a new traversal order of the vertices of a triangulated surface of genus g together with an orientation and coloration of the edges that extends the one proposed by Schnyder for the planar case. As a by-product we show how some recent schemes for compression and compact encoding of graphs can be extended to higher genus. All the algorithms presented here have linear time complexity.

This paper addresses the problem of representing the connectivity information of geometric objects using as little memory as possible. As opposed to raw compression issues, the focus is here on designing data structures that preserve the possibility of answering incidence queries in constant time. We propose in particular the first optimal representations for 3-connected planar graphs and triangulations, which are the most standard classes of graphs underlying meshes with spherical topology. Optimal means that these representations asymptotically match the respective entropy of the two classes, namely 2 bits per edge for 3-connected planar graphs, and 1.62 bits per triangle or equivalently 3.24 bits per vertex for triangulations.