View-dependent transmission of 3-D normal meshes

A view-dependent three-dimensional (3-D) normal mesh transmission technique is proposed in this work. A normal mesh is first partitioned into several segments, which are compressed independently. Each segment is given a different priority according to its visibility from the client's viewing position, which is sent to the server through a feedback channel. With the visibility criterion, the compressed bitstream of each segment is optimally truncated using a Lagrangian multiplier method. Moreover, when the viewing position of the client changes, the visibility priority of each segment is updated in the server and additional mesh information is transmitted to the client accordingly. Simulation results show that the proposed technique can reduce the transmission bandwidth significantly while maintaining the same visual quality.