Web-based remote rendering with IBRAC - (Image-Based Rendering Acceleration and Compression)

Recent advances in Internet and computer graphics stimulate use and development of 3D graphics on the World Wide Web. To increase efficiency of systems using 3D graphics on the web, the presented method utilizes previously rendered and transmitted images to accelerate the rendering and compression of new synthetic scene images. The algorithm employs ray casting and epipolar constraints to exploit spatial and temporal coherence between the current and previously rendered images. The reprojection of color and visibility data accelerates the computation of new images. The rendering method intrinsically computes a residual image, based on a user specified error tolerance that balances image quality against computation time and bandwidth. Encoding and decoding uses the same algorithm, so the transmitted residual image consists of significant data without addresses or offsets. We measure rendering speed-ups of four to seven without visible degradation. Compression ratios per frame are a factor of two to ten better than MPEG2 in our test cases. There is no transmission of 3D scene data to delay the first image. The efficiency of the server and client generally increases with scene complexity or data size since the rendering time is predominantly a function of image size. This approach is attractive for remote rendering applications such as web-based scientific visualization where a client system may be a relatively low-performance machine and limited network bandwidth makes transmission of large 3D dat impractical.