GPU-Based High Performance Terrain Compression
Xiao Dong Mu, Xiao Lin Niu, Shao Wang Shi, Wei Song · Applied Mechanics and Materials · 2013
It has been well accepted that compression is essential to the real-time visualization of large-terrain elevation data. To achieve efficient performance, a terrain compression method featuring high decoding speed is proposed in this paper. A combined prediction scheme is applied in the prediction stage. Golomb-Rice coding is then used to encode the residuals after the prediction stage. The style of the codeword is tailored to make the decoding process amenable to a GPU implementation. Then batching is used to further improve the decoding speed. The proposed method is easy to implement and simple to integrate into existing systems. Experiments show that the compression rate is better than PNG. In terms of decompression efficiency, this method archives a decoding speed of over 5.8 Gpix/s, which is much faster than most existing systems.