Texture compression of light maps using smooth profile functions
Author
Summary, in English
Light maps have long been a popular technique for visually rich real-time rendering in games. They typically contain smooth color gradients which current low bit rate texture compression techniques, such as DXT1 and ETC2, do not handle well. The application writer must therefore choose between doubling the bit rate by choosing a codec such as BC7, or accept the compression artifacts, neither of which is desirable. The situation is aggravated by the recent popularity of radiosity normal maps, where three light maps plus a normal map are used for each surface. We present a new texture compression algorithm targeting smoothly varying textures, such as the light maps used in radiosity normal mapping. On high-resolution light map data from real games, the proposed method shows quality improvements of 0.7 dB in PSNR over ETC2, and 2.8 dB over DXT1, for the same bit rate. As a side effect, our codec can also compress many standard images (not light maps) with better quality than DXT1/ETC2.
Department/s
Publishing year
2010
Language
English
Pages
143-152
Publication/Series
[Host publication title missing]
Links
Document type
Conference paper
Publisher
Eurographics - European Association for Computer Graphics
Topic
- Computer Science
Conference name
High Performance Graphics, 2010
Conference date
2010-06-25 - 2010-06-27
Conference place
Saarbrucken, Germany
Status
Published
Research group
- Computer Graphics