Interactive multiresolution surface viewing

Multiresolution analysis has been proposed as a basic tool supporting compression, progressive transmission, and level-of-detail control of complex meshes in a unified and theoretically sound way. We extend previous work on multiresolution analysis of meshes in two ways. First, we show how to perform multiresolution analysis of colored meshes by separately analyzing shape and color. Second, we describe efficient algorithms and data structures that allow us to incrementally construct lower resolution approximations to colored meshes from the geometry and color wavelet coefficients at interactive rates. We have integrated these algorithms in a prototype mesh viewer that supports progressive transmission, dynamic display at a constant frame rate independent of machine characteristics and load, and interactive choice of tradeoff between the amount of detail in geometry and color. The viewer operates as a helper application to Netscape, and can therefore be used to rapidly browse and display complex geometric models stored on the World Wide Web. CR