Overview
Texture compression is a standard bandwidth-saving feature in real-time rendering, but current graphics hardware only supports it for traditional, low-dynamic-range textures. While high-dynamic-range (HDR) textures are becoming increasingly common in applications, their performance is lacking behind due to much larger bandwidth requirements. Our aim in this work has been to investigate hardware-friendly approaches to HDR texture compression.
Papers
- Efficient High Dynamic Range Texture Compression
- We present a novel compression method for high dynamic range (HDR) textures, targeted for future graphics hardware. Identifying that the existing solutions provide either very high image quality or very simple hardware implementation, we aim to achieve both features in a single solution.
- Our approach improves upon an existing technique by incorporating a simple chrominance coding that allows overall image quality on par with the state of the art, but at a substantially lower encoding and decoding complexity. The end result is what we believe to be an excellent compromise between image quality and efficiency of hardware implementations.
- We evaluate our compression method using common test images and established HDR image quality metrics. Additionally, we complement these results with error measurements in the CIE L*a*b* color space in order to separately assess the quality of luminance and chrominance information.
- K. Roimela, T. Aarnio and J. Itäranta. Efficient High Dynamic Range Texture Compression. Proceedings of the 2008 Symposium in Interactive 3D Graphics.
- High Dynamic Range Texture Compression
- We present a novel compression scheme for high dynamic range textures, targeted for hardware implementation. Our method encodes images at a constant 8 bits per pixel, for a compression ratio of 6:1. We demonstrate that our method achieves good visual fidelity, surpassing DXTC texture compression of RGBE data which is the most practical method on existing graphics hardware. The decoding logic for our method is simple enough to be implemented as part of the texture fetch unit in graphics hardware.
- K. Roimela, T. Aarnio and J. Itäranta. High Dynamic Range Texture Compression. Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2006.
HDR images
Our original HDR images are free to download and use for research purposes.
hdr-test-images.zip (15 MB)
