Polygon-assisted JPEG and MPEG compression of synthetic images

Abstract

Recent advances in realtime image compression and decompression hardware make it possible for a high-performance graphics engine to operate as a rendering server in a networked environment. If the client is a low-end workstation or set-top box, then the rendering task can be split across the two devices. In this paper, we explore one strategy for doing this. For each frame, the server generates a high-quality rendering a low-quality rendering, subtracts the two, and sends the difference in compressed form. The client generates a matching low quality rendering, adds the decompressed difference image, and displays the composite. Within this paradigm, there is wide latitude to choose what constitutes a high-quality versus low-quality rendering. We have experimented with textured versus untextured surfaces, fine versus coarse tessellation of curved surfaces, Phong versus Gouraud interpolated shading, and antialiased versus nonantialiased edges. In all cases, our polygon-assisted compression looks subjectively better for a fixed network bandwidth than compressing and sending the high-quality rendering. We describe a software simulation that uses JPEG and MPEG-1 compression, and we show results for a variety of scenes.