3D space coding using virtual object surface

Visual information in 3D space has become the subject of much research in fields like 3D image communications and virtual reality. The huge amount of visual information in 3D space, however, makes the establishment of an efficient compression technique indispensable. In this regard, the authors have already proposed the concept of “space coding” that makes use of the redundancy in space itself, and have been investigating a specific coding technique that uses a multidimensional discrete cosine transform (DCT). In this paper, we extend this technique and propose a new coding technique that takes the structural characteristics of the object into account. To be more specific, we propose the concept of a “virtual object surface” as a technique for describing an object in structural terms taking compression rate into account, and attempt to improve coding efficiency with this technique. We also describe experiments performed to compare this technique with other techniques, and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed technique on the basis of the results obtained. In addition, we examine a coding technique for performing high-speed image synthesis from compressed data. © 2001 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 32(12): 47–59, 2001