3-D visual data compression based on ray-space projection

As 2-D image communication systems come into use widely, 3-D imaging technology enhancing the reality of visual communication is getting to be considered as a promising next-generation medium that can revolutionize information systems. To date, 3-D image communication has not been discussed at a comprehensive level because several kinds of promising 3-D display technologies are still making rapid progress. Considering such a situation, this paper introduces the concept of the “Integrated 3-D Visual Communication System”. The key feature in this new concept is a display-independent neutral representation of visual data. The flexibility of this concept will promote the progress of 3-D image communication systems before the 3-D display technology reaches maturity. In this paper, for this purpose, ray-based approach is examined. In the present representation method, the whole ray data is equally treated as a set of orthogonal views of the scene objects. The advantage of this approach is to allow the synthesis of any perspective view by gathering appropriate ray data from the set of orthogonal views independently of any geometric representation. A real-time progressive transmission method has been also examined. The experimental results show how the present representation method could be applied to the next-generation 3-D image communication system. keywords : 3-D image coding, 3-D image processing, virtual reality, display-independent representation of visual data, Ray-Space, ray-based representation, direction-uniform projection, orthogonal views, progressive coding, imagebased rendering