Texture compression using wavelet decomposition: a preview

Abstract

We present a new fixed-rate texture compression scheme based on the energy compaction properties of the Discrete Wavelet Transform. Targeting existing commodity graphics hardware and APIs, our method is using the DXT compression formats to perform the quantization and storage of the wavelet transform coefficients, ensuring very fast decoding speeds. An optimization framework minimizes the quantization error of the coefficients and improves the overall compression quality. Our method provides a variety of low bitrate encoding modes for the compression of grayscale and color textures. These encoding modes offer either improved quality or reduced storage over the DXT1 format. Furthermore, anisotropic texture filtering is performed efficiently with the help of the native texture hardware. The decoding speed and the simplicity of the implementation make our approach well suited for use in games and other interactive applications.