Geometry and Attribute Compression for Voxel Scenes

Voxel-based approaches are today's standard to encode volume data. Recently, directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) were successfully used for compressing sparse voxel scenes as well, but they are restricted to a single bit of (geometry) information per voxel. We present a method to compress arbitrary data, such as colors, normals, or reflectance information. By decoupling geometry and voxel data via a novel mapping scheme, we are able to apply the DAG principle to encode the topology, while using a palette-based compression for the voxel attributes, leading to a drastic memory reduction. Our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques and is well-suited for GPU architectures. We achieve real-time performance on commodity hardware for colored scenes with up to 17 hierarchical levels (a 128K³ voxel resolution), which are stored fully in core.

@Article { DKBTE16,
  author       = "Dado, Bas and Kol, Timothy R. and Bauszat, Pablo and Thiery, Jean-Marc and Eisemann, Elmar",
  title        = "Geometry and Attribute Compression for Voxel Scenes",
  journal      = "Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. Eurographics)",
  number       = "2",
  volume       = "35",
  pages        = "397--407",
  year         = "2016",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2016/DKBTE16"
}