Progressive transmission of subdivision surfaces

Abstract Triangle meshes are a standard representation for surface geometry in computer graphics and virtual reality applications. To achieve high realism of the modeled objects, the meshes typically consist of a very large number of faces. For broadcasting virtual environments over low-bandwidth data connections like the Internet it is highly important to develop efficient algorithms which enable the progressive transmission of such large meshes. In this paper we introduce a special representation for storing and transmitting meshes with subdivision connectivity which allows random access to the detail information. We present algorithms for the decomposition and the reconstruction of subdivision surfaces. With this technique, the receiver can reconstruct smooth approximations of the original surface from a rather small amount of data received.