Compression of 3D media for internet transmission

Abstract

Large real-life scenes can be captured in 3D efficiently by current capturing devices. The captured 3D data can be transmitted over the internet to a remote viewer, who can experience the captured scene with a display capable of displaying 3D. The 3D data output from a capturing device needs to be represented digitally for storage or internet transmission. Data compression is a vital part of successful internet transmission of data, as the available bandwidth is a limiting factor. In this thesis, we investigate the different ways to represent the 3D data, and how suited the representations are for internet transmission. We select the triangle mesh as the best suited representation, and investigate how to best compress it. We choose two mesh compression algorithms to implement, based on their effective compression rate. One is based on the valences of the vertices, while the other is based on the octree data structure. We evaluate the implementations based on factors important for internet transmission of captured 3D data, like the visual quality and required processing power.