Texture compression using wavelet decomposition

Figure 1: Demonstration of the proposed method when encoding a color image at various bitrates. Our method runs on commodity graphics hardware and supports efficient anisotropic texture filtering at fast decoding speeds. The numbers denote the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio. We present a new fixed-rate texture compression scheme based on the energy compaction properties of the Discrete Wavelet Trans-form. Targeting existing commodity graphics hardware and APIs, our method is using the DXT compression formats to perform the quantization and storage of the wavelet transform coefficients, en-suring very fast decoding speeds. An optimization framework min-imizes the quantization error of the coefficients and improves the overall compression quality. Our method provides a variety of low bitrate encoding modes for the compression of grayscale and color textures. These encoding modes offer either improved quality or reduced storage over the DXT1 format. Furthermore, anisotropic texture filtering is performed efficiently with the help of the native texture hardware. The decoding speed and the simplicity of the im-plementation make our approach well suited for use in games and other interactive applications.