Includes bibliographical references (p. 65-69).

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- California Institute of Technology, 2010. / Title from home page (viewed 03/02/2010). Advisor and committee chair names found in the thesis' metadata record in the digital repository. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. [120]-122).

Thesis (MSc)--University of Stellenbosch, 2008. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Florida, 2002. / Title from title page of source document. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S. in Electrical Engineering and M.S. in Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation)--Naval Postgraduate School, September 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): Xiaoping Yun, Fotis Papoulias, Joseph Sullivan. Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-90). Also available online.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 65-71).

Includes bibliographical references (p. 109-125).

published_or_final_version / Electrical and Electronic Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Network Rendering is an important problem in computer graphics and visualization applications. Reduction of the data needed for transmission over the network can greatly improve the performance. Many methods, such as mesh simplification, image tiling, level of detail and user action prediction, have been developed to solve this problem.. In this thesis, a new approach tackling the problem has been explored. A textured depth map (called Terrain Instance Map, TIM) based on re-projection method is introduced to render highly detailed terrain models. TIMs are created by a rendering server with a specified viewpoint from the client. Re-projection of the textured depth map in TIM can satisfy user requests for rendering in the client. In order to achieve an interactive frame rate at the client side and to reduce the workload of the server, a client side cache system is designed to reconstruct in-between screen shots from previously rendered results sparsely provided by the server. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective for network rendering. By changing the projection plane and splitting the viewport into small blocks, Screen Instance Map (SIM) is developed for arbitrary models with or without texture. The implemented network rendering system can satisfy interactive rendering in the client. Compared with existing methods, the new method needs virtually no additional storage space for the server and supports a wide range of inputs other than meshes. Finally, computation of camera frames for the virtual camera control is studied as a part of the network rendering system. A new Single Reflection method (SRM) to solve the rotation-minimizing directed frame (RMDF) problem is proposed and it is shown that the method is more robust and twice as fast than the existing method. Based on the new method, a simple and effective scheme for camera frames interpolation is devised. The methods and concepts introduced in this thesis are useful and effective for interactive network rendering. The TIM and SIM methods can be applied to network rendering for models with or without texture. The SRM method is essential for real-time camera frame computation and its extension can be applied to user interaction for viewing virtual environments. / published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy