Progressive transmission of point set surfaces based on geometry image representation

With the rapid development of digitizing devices and their applications in CAD and Computer Graphics, point set surface is receiving more and more attentions, and is gradually becoming one of the main 3D model representations. However, it usually takes a long time to transfer a point set surface with large data set. This paper proposes a geometry image representation based progressive transmission of point set surface on the network. The point set surface is transformed into a set of geometry images first to decrease the data storage, and hence to reduce the transmission time greatly. Based on the characteristics of the geometry images obtained, an enhanced pyramid image structure is developed to improve the performance of progressive image transmission. From the progressively transmitted image codes, the client side can rebuild multi-resolution images from which point set surface series with different levels of details can be rebuilt: the initial point set surface rebuilt from transmitted images has the gross structure of the original 3D model, and step by step, the rebuilt point set surfaces have more and more details until all the geometry images are transmitted. In this manner, the original 3D model is rebuilt completely on the client side, and this achieves high performance progressive transmission of point set surfaces.