Compression of computer graphics images with image-based rendering

We present a new compression algorithm for synthetic images that produces high compression rates by utilizing depth and color information from previously rendered images. Images predicted from prior images are combined with a residual image that may be transmitting from a remote location, to generate new images. The image-based rendering technique provides accurate motion prediction and accelerates rendering at the same time by exploiting temporal coherence. The motion prediction is computed and evaluated in image- order, pixel by pixel, producing residual images that are sparse and do not require address or index data. The system yields a compression ratio improvement of a factor of 4 - 10 over MPEG, in many cases. This approach is attractive for remote rendering applications where a client system may be a relatively low-performance machine and limited network bandwidth makes transmission of large 3D data impractical. The efficiency of the server generally increases with scene complexity or data size since the rendering time is predominantly a function of image size. This technique is also applicable to archiving animation.