Survey of lightweighting methods of huge 3D models for online Web3D visualization

With the rapid development of Web3D technologies, the online Web3D visualization, particularly for complex models or scenes, has been in a great demand. Owing to the major conflict between the Web3D system load and resource consumption in the processing of these huge models, the huge 3D model lightweighting methods for online Web3D visualization are reviewed in this paper. By observing the geometry redundancy introduced by man-made operations in the modeling procedure, several categories of lightweighting related work that aim at reducing the amount of data and resource consumption are elaborated for Web3D visualization. By comparing perspectives, the characteristics of each method are summarized, and among the reviewed methods, the geometric redundancy removal that achieves the lightweight goal by detecting and removing the repeated components is an appropriate method for current online Web3D visualization. Meanwhile, the learning algorithm, still in improvement period at present, is our expected future research topic. Various aspects should be considered in an efficient lightweight method for online Web3D visualization, such as characteristics of original data, combination or extension of existing methods, scheduling strategy, cache management, and rendering mechanism. Meanwhile, innovation methods, particularly the learning algorithm, are worth exploring.