Pyramid texture compression and decompression using interpolative vector quantization

Texture mapping is a common technique used to increase the visual quality of 3D scenes. As texture mapping requires a large amount of memory to deal with large textures generally required in the current visual systems, we propose an algorithm for compressing a pyramid texture used for mipmapping. Vector quantization is used to compress all levels of the pyramid texture to one representative value databook, one residual codebook and one index map. The proposed compression scheme uses interpolative texel difference vector quantization that compresses the difference between the interpolated surfaces generated by the representative value and the correct uncompressed texels of the texture at each level. The compressed pyramid texture can be accessed randomly and decompressed without loss of visual quality. We also propose a hardware architecture that performs the trilinear filtering with the compressed pyramid texture.