Survey of lightweighting methods of huge 3D models for online Web3D visualization

Currently, to access or interact with the world at home has become a popular lifestyle, and its great facility hasstimulated enormous demands in every industry sector. With various related applications emerging, theWeb3D-based systems that allow us to visualize, share, and interact with the 3D virtual environments throughthe internet have been the most popular due to their possibility of immersing, no installation required, andsecurity of information. However, a significant amount of literature or research has addressed a few issues.

The online Web3D visualization of 3D virtual models (or scenes) has become an imperative means of dataaccessing and sharing in the future, and a wide range of implements are available in online games, tourism,education, engineering, construction, etc. Meanwhile, there is a further increase in demand for more data typeand heavier data volume. However, with the user demand for a more refined model and the increasingcomplexity of the model itself, the resource conflict between the model processing requirement and thecapabilities of the Web3D system has evolved into a serious problem. Consequently, the online Web3Dvisualization has become a tough and challenging task. The huge 3D models (or scenes) are always man-mademodels developed using the modeling software such as 3ds Max and Solid Works. During the modelingprocedure, many operations such as copy/paste and drag and drop can bring numerous repeated patterns intothe final model based on translation, rotation, and scaling. Various research aiming at detecting and removingthese redundancies based on repeated patterns have been conducted. Based on our previous work, the lightweight approach that reduces the amount of data or its consumption forthe visualization system using the information hiding and geometric slimming strategy will be reviewed inthis paper. Furthermore, considering the main resource limitation of Web3D browsers in the occupied cachebuffer, network consumption, and online operation complexity, we will endeavor to present and summarizesome of the most popular geometrically lightweighting work for online Web3D visualization. As far as we areconcerned, this approach is more effective and functional in practical projects. Meanwhile, owing to ourlimited attempts and experiments, we believe that there still exist numerous other methods or potentialsolutions beyond the review presented in this paper.The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The popular lightweighting methods are firstly elaboratedin section 2. The characteristics of the reviewed method are described in section 3 from a comparativeperspective. The conclusion and future work are presented in section 4.