View-dependent streaming of progressive meshes

Abstract

Multiresolution geometry streaming has been well studied in recent years. The client can progressively visualize a triangle mesh from the coarsest resolution to the finest one while a server successively transmits detail information. However, the streaming order of the detail data usually depends only on the geometric importance, since basically a mesh simplification process is performed backwards in the streaming. Consequently, the resolution of the model changes globally during streaming even if the client does not want to download detail information for the invisible parts from a given view point. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for view-dependent streaming of multiresolution meshes. The transmission order of the detail data can be adjusted dynamically according to the visual importance with respect to the client's current view point. By adapting the truly selective refinement scheme for progressive meshes, our framework provides efficient view-dependent streaming that minimizes memory cost and network communication overhead. Furthermore, we reduce the per-client session data on the server side by using a special data structure for encoding which vertices have already been transmitted to each client. Experimental results indicate that our framework is efficient enough for a broadcast scenario where one server streams geometry data to multiple clients with different view points.