Practical Perceptually Adaptive Color Texture Map Compression for 3D Video Games

3D video games use texture maps to improve the realism and the visual detail of graphical objects without significantly increasing rendering complexity. The general trend in the gaming industry towards the use of large texture maps has lead to the use of texture compression techniques. Current color texture compression techniques treat all texture content uniformly which can lead to reduced visual quality. This paper addresses this issue by introducing a perceptually adaptive approach to color texture map compression that is based on the human vision system. The proposed method attempts to improve visual detail and compression performance without adding computational complexity. Experimental results show improved visual quality and compression performance over existing techniques. The proposed method is well suited for real-time applications such as 3D video games.