Progressive transmission of appearance preserving octree-textures

ABSTRACT

The development of shape repositories and 3D databases rises the need of online visualization of 3D objects. The main issue with the remote visualization of large meshes is the transfer latency of the geometric information. The remote viewer requires the transfer of all polygons before allowing object's manipulation. To avoid this latency problem, an approach is to send several levels of details of the same object so that lighter versions can be displayed sooner and replaced with more detailed version later on. This strategy requires more bandwidth, implies abruptly changes in object aspect as the geometry refines as well as a non negligible precomputing time. Since the appearance of a 3D model is more influenced by its normal field than its geometry, we propose a framework in which the object's LOD is replaced with a single simplified mesh with a LOD of appearance. By using Appearance Preserving Octree-Textures (APO), this appearance LOD is encoded in a unique texture, and the details are progressively downloaded when they are needed. Our APO-based framework achieves a nearly immediate object rendering while details are transmitted and smoothly added to the texture. Scenes keep a low geometry complexity while being displayed at interactive framerate with a maximum of visual details, leading to a better visual quality over bandwith ratio than pure geometric LOD schemes. Our implementation is platform independent, as it uses JOGL and runs on a simple web browser. Furthermore the framework doesn't require processing on the server side during the client rendering.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.2 Graphics Systems
          Subjects: Distributed/network graphics

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.7 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism
          Subjects: Color, shading, shadowing, and texture

Keywords:
GPU, appearance preserving, normal mapping, octree-textures, streaming