3D computational graceful degradation

With new multimedia standards, such as MPEG-4, media can progressively be transmitted at different levels of detail, which allows dynamic adaptation to the available network bandwidth. We present a new technique, 3D Computational Graceful Degradation (CGD), that exploits this incremental coding/decoding process to constrain the terminal's processing requirements to a predefined level, independently of the degree of complexity of the incoming data. Our attention is directed at 3D scenes, for which the variability of content complexity can range over several orders of magnitude. We provide evidence that the load of the 3D decoding and rendering modules can predictively be estimated and controlled, using a limited amount of statistical measures of the incoming 3D data.