Efficient representations of a 3-D object shape and its texture data have attracted wide attention for the transmission of computer graphics data and for the development of multi-view real image rendering systems on computer networks. Polygonal mesh data, which consist of connectivity information, geometry data, and texture data, are often used for representing 3-D objects in many applications. This paper presents a wavelet coding technique for coding the geometry data structured on a triangular lattice plane obtained by structuring the connectivity of the polygonal mesh data. Since the structured geometry data have an arbitrarily-shaped support on the triangular lattice plane, a shape-adaptive wavelet transform was used to obtain the wavelet coefficients, whose number is identical to the number of original data, while preserving the self-similarity of the wavelet coefficients across subbands. In addition, the wavelet coding technique includes extensions of the zerotree entropy (ZTE) coding for taking into account the rate-distortion properties of the structured geometry data. The parent-children dependencies are defined as the set of wavelet coefficients from different bands that represent the same spatial region in the triangular lattice plane, and the wavelet coefficients in the spatial tree are optimally pruned based on the rate-distortion properties of the geometry data. Experiments in which proposed wavelet coding was applied to some sets of polygonal mesh data showed that the proposed wavelet coding achieved better coding efficiency than the Topologically Assisted Geometry Compression scheme adopted in the MPEG-4 standard.

In this letter, we address geometry coding of 3-D mesh models. Using a joint prediction, the encoder predicts vertex positions in the layer traversal order. After we apply the joint prediction algorithm to eliminate redundancy among vertex positions using both position and angle values of neighboring triangles, we encode those prediction errors using a uniform quantizer and an entropy coder. The proposed scheme demonstrates improved coding efficiency for various VRML test data.

This paper surveys recent research activities on three major areas of digital media information base, namely, video database systems as a typical example of temporal application, database systems for mixed reality as an instance of spatial application, and kansei management for digital media retrieval as a case of humanistic feelings application. Current research results by the project Advanced Database Systems for Integration of Media and User Environments are reported.

Support of collaborative work and management of spatio-temporal data has become one of the most interesting and important database applications, which is due to the tremendous progress of database and its surrounding technologies in the last decade. In this paper, we investigate the new generation database technologies that are needed to support such advanced applications. Because of the recent progress of virtual reality technology, virtual work spaces are now available. We examine a typical CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) fsystem to identify database problems that arise from it. We introduce typical approaches to database improvement based on the high-level view and the virtual reality technique. Also, in this paper, the following are introduced and discussed: the design and implementation of three- and four-dimensional spatio-temporal database systems, VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) database systems, fast access methods to spatio-temporal data, and the interval-based approach to temporal multimedia databases.

This paper proposes a new framework of managing virtual spaces based on spatial databases as an extension of VRML-based systems. The framework is suitable for treating continuous virtual spaces and for managing the quality of service (QoS) of the virtual spaces depending on user's operations and situations of computer resources. Levels of detail (LoD) of 3D objects is the most important rule for rendering scenes dynamically while managing the QoS. This paper describes a method of managing the QoS depending on the LoD in the form of spatial queries. An advantage of the framework is that spatial databases can incrementally construct virtual spaces in clients using differential descriptions based on VRML, that is, DVRML, proposed in this paper. Dynamic spatial data such as avatar's movement and real-time multimedia data such as videos should be shared by all participants in a virtual space in real time. Our framework can also handle dynamic spatial data by means of real-time updating of some spatial objects in spatial databases as well as static spatial data. We developed some experimental applications based on the framework in order to prove that it is feasible for networked virtual spaces with video components.