High fidelity compression of irregularly sampled height-fields

Marais, Patrick and Gain, James (2007) High fidelity compression of irregularly sampled height-fields, South African Computer Journal, 38, 40-50.

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Abstract

This paper presents a method to compress irregularly sampled height-fields based on a multi-resolution framework. Unlike many other height-field compression techniques, no resampling is required so the original height-field data is recovered (less quantization error). The method decomposes the compression task into two complementary phases: an in-plane compression scheme for (x, y) coordinate positions, and a separate multi-resolution z compression step. This decoupling allows subsequent improvements in either phase to be seamlessly integrated and also allows for independent control of bit-rates in the decoupled dimensions, should this be desired. Results are presented for a number of height-field sample sets quantized to 12 bits for each of x and y, and 10 bits for z. Total lossless encoded data sizes range from 11 to 24 bits per point, with z bit-rates lying in the range 2.9 to 8.1 bits per z coordinate. Lossy z bit-rates (we do not lossily encode x and y) lie in the range 0.7 to 5.9 bits per z coordinate, with a worst-case root-mean-squared (RMS) error of less than 1.7% of the z range. Even with aggressive lossy encoding, at least 40% of the point samples are perfectly reconstructed.

Item Type:	Journal article (paginated)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	height-field, point compression, multi-resolution height encoding, irregular sampling
Subjects:	Information systems > Data management systems > Database design and models Computing methodologies > Computer graphics
Date Deposited:	15 Nov 2007
Last Modified:	10 Oct 2019 15:34
URI:	http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/439

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