Hierarchical texture compression

Texture mapping is a technique for adding visual realism to the computer generated images. As the level of realism increases with the number and the resolution of textures, we are faced with the problem of limited texture memory space. Moreover, in order to alleviate the aliasing artefacts many graphics systems use the mipmapping technique which needs to store additionally the texture pyramid. We propose an algorithm for texture compression which is characterized by low computational complexity, random access to compressed data and the hierarchical texture representation. The proposed hierarchical texture compression algorithm (HiTC) is based on a block-wise approach, where each block is subject to the modified fractal compression method and is partly represented by Laplacian pyramid. This allows us to incorporate the mip-map structure into the compressed texture and perfectly suits for real-time computer graphics applications.