Multiple-Description Geometry Compression for Networked Interactive 3D Graphics

In this paper we propose a novel multiple-description geometry compression framework in order to improve the error resilience of streaming 3D graphics contents over lossy packet-switched networks. A 3D polygonal mesh is split into two or more sub-meshes, each of which is compressed independently of each other into a so-called co-description. If any one of the co-descriptions is received, it can be decoded on its own to an approximation of the original mesh. If several co-descriptions are available to the decoder, they can be decoded in collaboration with each other to refine the approximation. To facilitate the multiple-description geometry compression, we also propose a new surface-based quadratic prediction scheme for 3D polygonal meshes. The prediction residuals are compressed by optimized context-based arithmetic coding. This new geometry coding approach achieves competitive compression performance compared with existing single description and multi-resolution geometry compression methods, with added features of high error resilience and progressive transmission capability