Volumetric texture data compression scheme for transmission

We present a texture data compression technique for transmission of volumetric weather radar data. High resolution volume rendering of such time varying volumetric data sets requires large size and number of texture files. In case of WebGL based volume rendering on web browsers, performance problems occur due to the latencies associated with loading of 3D assets, especially transmission of huge texture files. Existing compression technique can help to solve this problem. The most relevant work is S3TC texture compression. As an advanced compression scheme, we combine the S3TC compression method with efficient encoding of volume data in the RGBA channels of an image followed by DEFLATE compression to further reduce the file size. We show how this optimized scheme with X3D/X3DOM extensions fits into our weather data visualization application requirements and provide experimental results.