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Out‐of‐core compression and decompression of large n ‐dimensional scalar fields
Author(s) -
Ibarria Lawrence,
Lindstrom Peter,
Rossignac Jarek,
Szymczak Andrzej
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
computer graphics forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1467-8659
pISSN - 0167-7055
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8659.00681
Subject(s) - lossless compression , lossy compression , scalar field , data compression , scalar (mathematics) , computer science , algorithm , data compression ratio , mathematics , image compression , geometry , artificial intelligence , image processing , image (mathematics) , mathematical physics
We present a simple method for compressing very large and regularly sampled scalar fields. Our method is particularlyattractive when the entire data set does not fit in memory and when the sampling rate is high relative to thefeature size of the scalar field in all dimensions. Although we report results foranddata sets, the proposedapproach may be applied to higher dimensions. The method is based on the new Lorenzo predictor, introducedhere, which estimates the value of the scalar field at each sample from the values at processed neighbors. The predictedvalues are exact when the n‐dimensional scalar field is an implicit polynomial of degreen − 1 . Surprisingly,when the residuals (differences between the actual and predicted values) are encoded using arithmetic coding,the proposed method often outperforms wavelet compression in an L ∞ sense. The proposed approach may beused both for lossy and lossless compression and is well suited for out‐of‐core compression and decompression,because a trivial implementation, which sweeps through the data set reading it once, requires maintaining only asmall buffer in core memory, whose size barely exceeds a single ( n −1)‐ dimensional slice of the data. Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Compression, scalar fields,out‐of‐core.