A joint source and channel coding approach for progressively compressed 3-D mesh transmission

In this paper, we present an unequal error protection method for packet-loss resilient transmission of progressively compressed 3D meshes. The proposed method is based on a source and channel coding approach where we set up a theoretical framework for the overall system by which the channel packet loss behavior and the channel bandwidth can be directly related to the decoded mesh quality at the receiver. In particular, we develop a statistical distortion measure and optimize it to compute the best combination of (i) the number of triangles to transmit, (ii) the total number of channel coding bits, and (iii) the distribution of these error-protection bits among the transmitted layers in order to maximize the expected decoded mesh quality at the receiver. The proposed method differs from the earlier approaches in two major aspects: (i) determination of the number of channel coding bits (C) and (ii) the approach of reducing the source rate in order to accommodate for channel coding bits. When the proposed method is used to transmit a typical 3D mesh over a channel with a 10% packet loss rate, the distortion (measured using the Hausdorff distance between the original and the decoded overly sampled meshes) is reduced by 50% compared to the case when no error protection is applied.