International Journal of Computer Science Issues

More than a traditional journal...

Interactive distributed visualization is an emerging technology with numerous applications. However, many of the present approaches to interactive distributed visualization have limited performance since they are based on the traditional polygonal processing graphics pipeline. In contrast, image-based rendering uses multiple images of the scene instead of a 3D geometrical representation, and so has the key advantage that the final output is independent of the scene complexity, and depends on the desired final image resolution. These multiple images are referred to as the light field dataset. In this paper we propose an on-demand solution for efficiently transmitting visualization data to remote users/clients. This is achieved through sending selected parts of the dataset based on the current client viewpoint, and is done instead of downloading a complete replica of the light field dataset to each client, or remotely sending a single rendered view back from a central server to the user each time the user updates their viewing parameters. The on-demand approach shows stable performance as the number of clients increases because the load on the server and the network traffic are reduced. Furthermore, detailed performance studies show that the proposed on-demand scheme outperforms the current local and remote solutions in terms of interactivity measured in frames per second. Finally, we conclude that the design of our 3D visualization system, based on image-based rendering coupled with an on-demand transmission model, has contributed to the field, and is a good basis for the future development of collaborative, distributed visualization systems.