Network Adaptive Textured Mesh Generation for Collaborative 3D Tele-Immersion

3D Tele-Immersion (3DTI) has emerged as an efficient environment for virtual interactions and collaborations in a variety of fields like rehabilitation, education, gaming, etc. In 3DTI, geographically distributed users are captured using multiple cameras and immersed in a single virtual environment. The quality of experience depends on the available network bandwidth, quality of the 3D model generated and the time taken for rendering. In a collaborative environment, achieving high quality, high frame rate rendering by transmitting data to multiple sites having different bandwidth is challenging. In this paper we introduce a network adaptive textured mesh generation scheme to transmit varying quality data based on the available bandwidth. To reduce the volume of information transmitted, a visual quality based vertex selection approach is used to generate a sparse representation of the user. This sparse representation is then transmitted to the receiver side where a sweep-line based technique is used to generate a 3D mesh of the user. High visual quality is maintained by transmitting a high resolution texture image compressed using a lossy compression algorithm. In our studies users were unable to notice visual quality variations of the rendered 3D model even at 90% compression.