Incremental texture compression for real-time rendering

Abstract

In photorealistic rendering, multiple high-resolution texture images are needed to add details to the scene, which makes the limited texture memory exhausted soon. In this paper, we propose a novel compression algorithm for texture image - incremental texture compression algorithm, in which the textures are compressed to small-sized format and these compressed data are decompressed and rendered in real-time by programmable graphics hardware. Our method dynamically adds new contents into the codebook only when the existed codebook can not encode current region of the texture. In this way, this method can not only compress static textures with high compression ratio, but also efficiently encode dynamic textures in a stream-like manner due to the characteristic of dynamically updating the codebook. Experimental results show that our method is effective to encode textures for real time rendering. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.