GPU-Based Texture Encoding and Real-Time Rendering
Ying Tang · Chinese Journal of Computers · 2007
In photorealistic rendering, multiple high-resolution texture images are needed to add details to the scene, which makes the limited texture memory exhausted soon. This paper proposes a novel encoding algorithm for texture image — incremental texture encoding algorithm, for which the compressed textures are decompressed and rendered in real-time by programmable graphics hardware. This method gradually fills in the codebook by dynamically adding in the elements when the current codebook can not encode the region of the image being processed. In this way, the method can not only produces high compression ratio for texture images with self-similarity, but also encode the image sequences in a stream-like manner due to the property of dynamically updating the codebook. Experimental results show that the method is effective and efficient in encoding and rendering still/animated textures.