Image-based rendering on mobile devices

Abstract

The research work of this thesis is motivated by a desire to render views of 3D environments in real-time on mobile devices. Considering the weak support for 3D hardware accelerations of mobile devices, it is hard to render geometry-based models at an interactive rate. The utilization of image-based rendering techniques in mobile devices is presented in this thesis. In order to have a systematical knowledge of image-based rendering, we briefly review different image-based rendering techniques. Although image-based rendering is advantageous to geometry-based rendering in certain circumstances, further tailoring is still required to immigrate it to mobile devices. This thesis presents a technique for running image-based rendering tasks on mobile devices. This technique comprises a lightweight rendering algorithm and a local cache management mechanism. Results have shown that the proposed algorithm requires less CPU cycles compared to other algorithms, and that the local buffer management mechanism is robust to communication errors.