GPU-based lossless volume data compression

Abstract

In rendering, textures are usually consuming more graphics memory than the geometry. This is especially true when rendering regular sampled volume data as the geometry is a single box. In addition, volume rendering suffers from the curse of dimensionality. Every time the resolution doubles, the number of projected pixels is multiplied by four but the amount of data is multiplied by eight. Data compression is thus mandatory even with the increasing amount of memory available on today's GPUs. Existing compression schemes are either lossy or do not allow on-the-fly random access to the volume data while rendering. Both of these properties are, however, important for high quality direct volume rendering. In this paper, we propose a lossless compression and caching strategy that allows random access and decompression on the GPU using a compressed volume object.