Polygon-assisted JPEG and MPEG compression of synthetic images

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Abstract
Recent advances in realtime image compression and decompression hardware make it possible for a high-performance graphics engine to operate as a rendering server in a networked environment. If the client is a low-end workstation or set-top box, then the rendering task can be split across the two devices. In this paper, we explore one strategy for doing this. For each frame, the server generates a high-quality rendering and a low-quality rendering, subtracts the two, and sends the difference in compressed form. The client generates a matching low quality rendering, adds the decompressed difference image, and displays the composite. Within this paradigm, there is wide latitude to choose what constitutes a high-quality versus low-quality render- ing. We have experimented with textured versus untextured sur- faces, fine versus coarse tessellation of curved surfaces, Phong versus Gouraud interpolated shading, and antialiased versus nonantialiased edges. In all cases, our polygon-assisted compres- sion looks subjectively better for a fixed network bandwidth than compressing and sending the high-quality rendering. We describe a software simulation that uses JPEG and MPEG-1 compression, and we show results for a variety of scenes.

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