Receiver-driven view-dependent streaming of progressive mesh

Abstract

Progressive mesh streaming enables users to view 3D meshes over the network with increasing level of details, by sending coarse version of the meshes initially, followed by a series of refinements. To optimally increase the rendered mesh quality, refinements should be sent in descending order of their visual contributions based on the user's viewpoint. A common approach is to let the sender decide this sending order, but the computational cost of making this decision prohibits such sender-driven approach from scaling to large number of clients. To improve scalability, we propose a receiver-driven protocol, in which the receiver decides the sending order and explicitly requests the refinements, while the sender simply sends the data requested. The sending order is computed at the receiver by estimating the visibility and visual contributions of the refinements, even before receiving them, with the help of GPU. Experiments show that our protocol reduces the CPU cost of the sender by 24% and the outgoing taffic of the sender by 40%. © 2008 ACM.