Streaming MPEG-4 textures: A 3D view-dependent approach

One of the key functionalities in today's multimedia applications is streaming. However unlike video, streaming 3D content remains rare, especially for textures. In this paper, we present an intelligent, view-dependent approach for streaming and decoding MPEG-4 textures in order to save network and platform resources, while minimizing the perceived quality loss. Different regions of the 3D object's texture are independently decoded up to a desired quality. Whenever viewing conditions change, newly visible texture regions are transmitted and/or already transmitted regions are refined. This 3D view-dependent decoding of MPEG-4 textures is possible by exploiting the error resilience feature in the MPEG-4 texture-coding tool. It allows a high flexibility (i.e. number of possible quality levels) but at the cost of an increased bitstream size. However, since streaming is possible, the transmission of the bitstream is spread over time, reducing the instantaneous bandwidth and processing cost.