Progressive transmission of subdivision surfaces

Triangle meshes are a standard representation for surface geometry in compu ter graphics and virtual reality applications. To achieve high realism of t he modeled objects, the meshes typically consist of a very large number of faces. For broadcasting virtual environments over low bandwidth data connec tions like the Internet it is highly important to develop efficient algorit hms which enable the progressive transmission of such large meshes. In this paper we introduce a special representation for storing and transmitting m eshes with subdivision connectivity which allows random access to the detai l information. We present algorithms for the decomposition and the reconstr uction of subdivision surfaces. With this technique, the receiver can recon struct smooth approximations of the original surface from a rather small, a mount of data received. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.