Conversion and encoding of simplical progressive grids of arbitrary dimension

We present an irregular simplical grid for the progressive display and transmission of CFD-simulation datasets of arbitrary dimension. Spatial and temporal dimensions are treated equally to exploit the coherencies between different timeframes of a simulation. The data is hierarchically arranged by its importance to minimize the amount of data to be stored or transmitted. We use a recursive partitioning scheme for the grid cells, which tests a number of candidate partitionings by their quality. Furthermore a progressive encoding scheme is proposed, which minimizes the effort to store the topology of the grid. Possible applications stretch beyond progressive transmission into areas of data compression and visualization based on multiple levels-of-detail.