Real-time reconstruction of wavelet-encoded meshes for view-dependent transmission and visualization

Wavelet methods for geometry encoding is a recently emerged superset of multiresolution analysis which has proven to be very efficient in terms of compression and adaptive transmission of three-dimensional (3-D) content. The decorrelating power and space/scale localization of wavelets enable efficient compression of arbitrary meshes as well as progressive and local reconstruction. Recent techniques based on zerotree compression have shown to be among the best lossy mesh compression methods, while remaining compatible with selective transmission of geometric data at various levels of detail. While some progressive reconstruction schemes have been proposed in the past, we show in this paper that this representation, recently proposed in the MPEG4 standard, can be efficiently used to perform real-time, view-dependent reconstruction of large meshes. The proposed system combines algorithms for local updates, cache management, and server/client dialog. The local details management is an improvement of progressive reconstructions built on top of hierarchical structures. It enables fast, homogeneous accommodation and suppression of wavelet coefficients at any level of subdivision, with time complexity independent of the size of the reconstructed mesh. The cache structure wisely exploits the hierarchical character of the received data, in order to avoid redundant information transmission. The whole system enables the client to have total control on the quality of navigation according to its storage and processing capabilities, whatever the size of the mesh.