Buffer Management for 3D Image-based Rendering over Wireless Network with QoS Adaptation

As an alternative way of rendering novel views of real and/or virtual environments to geometry-based models, 3D image-based rendering is getting more attention. Taking the weak hardware acceleration support of mobile devices into consideration, image-based rendering is a good choice for interactive 3D applications for such devices. However, because of the small storage size of mobile devices, the large size of the data set used by most modern image-based rendering techniques often introduces difficulties in utilizing image-based rendering on mobile devices. Therefore, a reference image buffer management mechanism is critical to the success of image-based rendering techniques on mobile devices. Different buffer management policies may result in different quality-of-service. In this paper, we compare the performance of several buffer management policies based on customized QoS factors for image-based rendering techniques. In order to make our experiments general, we show that image-based rendering techniques are interpolations of the Plenoptic function and define the QoS factors based on the interpolation theory. The results of the experiments show the impacts of different buffer management policies on customized QoS factors. Because the QoS factors do not depend on any special algorithms, this result keeps true for all modern image-based rendering algorithms