Approximate methods

Figure 1: Encoding extreme colors. Left to right: original (48 bpp), our method (8 bpp), DXTC-encoded RGBE (12 bpp), and our method with less bits for color (see 3.2). The intensity of the red illumination brings out the artifacts resulting from low color resolution. 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. CR Categories: I.3.1 [Computer Graphics]: Hardwar