Compression-domain Seamless Multiresolution Visualization of Gigantic Meshes on Mobile Devices

We present a software architecture for distributing and rendering gigantic 3D triangle meshes on common handheld devices. Our approach copes with strong bandwidth and hardware capabilities limitations in terms with a compression-domain adaptive multiresolution rendering approach. The method uses a regular conformal hierarchy of tetrahedra to spatially partition the input 3D model and to arrange mesh fragments at different resolution. We create compact GPU-friendly representations of these fragments by constructing cache-coherent strips that index locally quantized vertex data, exploiting the bounding tetrahedron for creating local barycentic parametrization of the geometry. For the first time, this approach supports local quantization in a fully adaptive seamless 3D mesh structure. For web distribution, further compression is obtained by exploiting local data coherence for entropy coding. At run-time, mobile viewer applications adaptively refine a local multiresolution model maintained in a GPU by asynchronously loading from a web server the required fragments. CPU and GPU cooperate for decompression, and a shaded rendering of colored meshes is performed at interactive speed directly from an intermediate compact representation using only 8bytes/vertex, therefore coping with both memory and bandwidth limitations.The quality and performance of the approach is demonstrated with the interactive exploration of gigatriangle-sized models on common mobile platforms.

@InProceedings{BGMT13,
  author       = {Balsa Rodriguez, M. and Gobbetti, E. and Marton, F. and Tinti, A.},
  title        = {Compression-domain Seamless Multiresolution Visualization of Gigantic Meshes on Mobile Devices},
  booktitle    = {Proc. ACM Web3D International Symposium},
  pages        = {99--107},
  month        = {june},
  year         = {2013},
  publisher    = {ACM Press},
  keywords     = {multiresolution visualization, mobile devices},
  url          = {https://publications.crs4.it/pubdocs/2013/BGMT13},
}