Remote Visualization by Browsing Image Based Databases with Logistical Networking

The need to provide remote visualization of large datasets with adequate levels of quality and interactively has become a major impediment to distributed collaboration in Computational Science. Although Image Based Rendering (IBR) techniques based on plenoptic functions have some important advantages over other approaches to this problem, they suffer from an inability to deal with issues of network latency and server load, due to the large size of the IBR databases they generate. Consequently, IBR techniques have been left largely unexplored for this purppose. In this paper we describe strategies for addressing these obstacles using Logistical Networking (LoN), which is a new and highly scalable approach to deploying storage as a shared communication resource. Leveraging LoN technology and infrastructure, we developed a remote visualization system based on concepts of light field rendering, an IBR method using a 4-D plenoptic function. Our system extends existing work on light fields by employing a modified method of parameterization and data organization that supports more efficient prefetching, caching and loss-less compression. Using this approach, we have been able to interactively browse multi-gigabyte, high-resolution light field databases across the wide area network at 30 frames per second.