Fast decompression for web-based view-dependent 3D rendering

Ponchio F, Dellepiane M

Multi-resolution  Web visualization  3D compression 

Efficient transmission of 3D data to Web clients and mobile applications remains a challenge due to limited bandwidth. Most of the research focus in the context of mesh compression has been on improving compression ratio. However, in this context the use of Javascript on the Web and low power CPUS in mobile applications led to critical computational costs. Progressive decoding improves the user experience by providing a simplified version of the model that refines with time, and it's able to mask latency. Current approaches do so at very poor compression rates or at additional computational cost. The need for better performing algorithms is especially evident with this class of methods where Limper [Limper et al. 2013b] demonstrated how decoding time becomes a limiting factor even at moderately low bandwidths. In this paper we present a novel multi-resolution WebGL based rendering algorithm which combines progressive loading, view-dependent resolution and mesh compression, providing high frame rates and a decoding speed of million of triangles per second in Javascript. This method is parallelizable, robust to non-manifold meshes, and scalable to very large models.