This paper describes a networked three-dimensional (3-D) rendering framework that allows low-powered mobile devices to simulate the interactive rendering of remote dense 3-D environment. The framework is based on 3-D image warping, especially suited to low-resolution screens and involves the transmission of sparse residual images. The use of an oversized reference image, superview, to cope with the visibility gap errors and the acceleration techniques aimed at improving the frame-rates are explored. It is shown that the described framework offers a potential alternative for interactive rendering of remote 3-D environment on low-powered clients where the triangle mesh display is impractical.

Three-dimensional (3-D) models are information-rich and provide compelling visualization effects. However downloading and viewing 3-D scenes over the network may be excessive. In addition low-end devices typically have insufficient power and/or memory to render the scene interactively in real-time. Alternatively,3-D image warping, an image-based-rendering technique that renders a two-dimensional(2-D) depth view to form new views intended from different viewpoints and/or orientations, may be employed on a limited device. In a networked 3-D environment,the warped views may be further compensated by the graphically rendered views and transmitted to clients at times. Depth views can be considered as a compact model of 3-D scenes enabling the remote rendering of complex 3-D environment on relatively low-end devices. The major overhead of the 3-D image warping environment is the transmission of the depth views of the initial and subsequent references. This paper addresses the issue by presenting an effective remote rendering environment based on the deep compression of depth views utilizing the context statistics structure present in depth views. The warped image quality is also explored by reducing the resolution of the depth map. It is shown that proposed deep compression of the remote rendered view significantly outperforms the JPEG2000 and enables the realtime rendering of remote 3-D scene while the degradation of warped image quality is visually imperceptible for the benchmark scenes.

Depth images, comprising pixel intensities and depth map, are viewed as a compact model of 3D scenes and used in 3D image warping for the distributed or collaborative virtual environment to enable the distributed rendering of complex 3D scenes at relatively low cost. The major overhead of the model is the transmission of the depth images of the initial reference and the subsequent new views that may be up to a few Mbs in size depending on the screen resolution. This paper presents efficient compression techniques specifically designed for the depth images. Additionally we experiment with the warped image quality by reducing the resolution of the depth map. We show that significant compression can be achieved at a cost of a very modest impairment in the perceptual quality of the warped image.