Neural Compression of 3D Meshes using Sparse Implicit Representation

The growing demand for high-quality 3D mesh models has fueled the need for efficient 3D mesh compression techniques. However, existing methods often exhibit suboptimal compression performance due to the inefficient representation of mesh data. To address this issue, we propose a novel neural mesh compression method based on Sparse Implicit Representation (SIR). Specifically, SIR records signed distance field (SDF) values only on regular grids near the surface, enabling high-resolution structured representation of arbitrary geometric data with a significantly lower memory cost, while still supporting precise surface recovery. Building on this representation, we construct a lightweight Sparse Neural Compression (SNC) network to extract compact embedded features from the SIR and encode them into a bitstream. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art mesh and point cloud compression approaches in both compression performance and computational efficiency across a variety of mesh models. The source code is available at https://github.com/yydlmzyz1/SIR-SNC.