PanoWalk: A Remote Image-Based Rendering System for Mobile Devices

Real-time rendering of complex 3D scene on mobile devices is a challenging task. The main reason is that mobile devices have limited computational capabilities and are lack of powerful 3D graphics hardware support. In this paper, we propose a remote Image-Based Rendering system for mobile devices to interactively visualize real world and synthetic scenes under wireless network. Our system uses panoramic video as building block of representing scene data. The scene data is compressed with one MPEG like encoding scheme tailored for mobile device. The compressed data is stored on remote server. Our system carefully partitions the rendering task between client and server. The server is responsible for determining the required data for rendering novel views. It streams the required data to client in server pushing manner. After receiving data, mobile client carries out rendering locally using image warping and displays the resultant images onto its small screen. Experimental results show that our system can achieve real time rendering speed on mainstream mobile devices. It allows multiple mobile clients to explore the same or different scenes simultaneously.