High-performance texture decompression hardware

Image compression in the context of texture mapping presents two interesting advantages and brings high-performance texture mapping into the range of lowcost systems. The texture memory size is significantly reduced, and less bandwidth between the memory and the texturing unit is needed. Textures are compressed with a lossy method based on vector quantisation. We present a hardware architecture that decompresses textures before mapping them onto objects. The errors due to vector quantisation and the inherent image degradation in the compressed texture are analysed. To enhance the subjective image quality, adaptive space-variant filtering is applied locally during the texture-mapping phase to reduce the artefacts introduced by lossy compression in critical image areas.

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