On the compression and streaming of concentric mosaic data for free wandering in a realistic environment over the Internet

In this paper, we describe a system for wandering in a realistic environment over the Internet. The environment is captured by the concentric mosaic, compressed via the reference block coder (RBC), and accessed and delivered over the Internet through the virtual media (Vmedia) access protocol. One of the key contributions of the paper is the proposal of the RBC concentric mosaic coder. The RBC coder not only compresses the huge dataset of the concentric mosaic very efficiently, but also produces a well-organized bitstream that can be accessed just-in-time (JIT). To reconstruct a virtual view, only a portion of the RBC bitstream needs to be accessed and decoded. This greatly reduces the memory and computation requirement of the viewer compared with first decoding the entire concentric mosaic data set and then rendering from the decoded data. Our second contribution is the employment of the Vmedia protocol to deliver the compressed concentric mosaic bitstream just-in-time over the Internet. Only the bitstream segments corresponding to the current view are streamed over the Internet. The delivered bitstream segments are managed by a local Vmedia cache, so that frequently used bitstream segments do not need to be streamed over the Internet repeatedly, and a RBC bitstream larger than the memory capacity can be easily handled. Combining RBC and Vmedia, a concentric mosaic interactive browser is developed through which the user can freely wander in a realistic environment, e.g., rotate around, walk forward/backward, and sidestep, even under a tight bandwidth.