Remote rendering of massively textured 3D scenes through progressive texture maps

In this paper we present a new progressive texture map (PTM) format that encodes the mipmap levels of a texture map into a compact and progressive way. In order to man-age these PTMs for a purpose of remote visualisation of architectural 3D scenes, we make use of a space subdivi-sion and a visibility computation algorithm that are per-formed in a preprocessing step. In addition to this prepro-cessing, we precompute a metric which is used during the navigation to select the texture mipmap levels to be down-loaded and those to be added/removed to/from the graphics hardware memory. Thanks to these mechanisms, we gen-erate and visualize scalable databases for architectural 3D scenes that contain a large number of high resolution tex-ture maps. The visualisation system we propose is based on a client/server architecture and allows for the transmis-sion and the visualization of 3D scenes using either a re-mote server connected via low bandwidth networks or a local server. In addition our system automatically adapts to the power of the client machine