Error-resilient coding of 3-D graphic models via adaptive mesh segmentation

Current coding techniques for 3-D graphic models mainly focus on coding efficiency, which makes them extremely sensitive to channel errors due to the irregular mesh structure. We introduce a new approach for error-resilient coding of arbitrary 3-D graphic models by extending the error-free constructive traversal compression scheme proposed by Li and Kuo (see MPEG-4 Tokyo Meeting, 1998, Contribution Doc. M3324, and Proc. IEEE, vol.86, p.1052-63, 1998). A 3-D mesh of an arbitrary structure is partitioned into pieces of a smaller uniform size with joint boundaries. The size of a piece is determined adaptively based on the channel error rate. The topology and geometry information of each joint boundary and each piece of a connected component is coded independently. The coded topology and first several important bit-planes of the joint-boundary data are protected against channel errors by using the Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem error-correcting code. At the decoder, each piece is decoded and checked for channel errors. The decoded joint-boundary information is used to perform data recovery and error concealment on the corrupted piece data. All decoded pieces are combined together according to their configuration to reconstruct all connected components of the complete 3-D model. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach has excellent error resiliency at a reasonable bit-rate overhead. The techniques is also capable of incrementally rendering one connected component of the 3-D model at a time.