Adaptive online transmission of 3-D TexMesh using scale-space and visual perception analysis

Efficient online visualization of three-dimensional (3-D) mesh, mapped with photo realistic texture, is essential for a variety of applications such as museum exhibits and medical images. In these applications synthetic texture or color per vertex loses authenticity and resolution. An image-based view dependent approach requires too much overhead to generate a 360/spl deg/ display for online applications. We propose using a mesh simplification algorithm based on scale-space analysis of the feature point distribution, combined with an associated visual perception analysis of the surface texture, to address the needs of adaptive online transmission of high quality 3-D objects. The premise of the proposed textured mesh (TexMesh)simplification, taking the human visual system into consideration, is the following: given limited bandwidth, texture quality in low feature density surfaces can be reduced, without significantly affecting human perception. The advantage of allocating higher bandwidth, and thus higher quality, to dense feature density surfaces, is to improve the overall visual fidelity. Statistics on feature point distribution and their associated texture fragments are gathered during preprocessing. Online transmission is based on these statistics,which can be retrieved in constant time. Using an initial estimated bandwidth,a scaled mesh is first transmitted. Starting from a default texture quality,we apply an efficient Harmonic Time Compensation Algorithm based on the current bandwidth and a time limit, to adaptively adjust the texture quality of the next fragment to be transmitted. Properties of the algorithm are proved. Experimental results show the usefulness of our approach.