Adaptive scalable texture compression

Abstract

We describe a fixed-rate, lossy texture compression system that is designed to offer an unusual degree of flexibility and to support a very wide range of use cases, while providing better image quality than most formats in common use today. The system supports both 2D and 3D textures, at both standard and high dynamic range, at bit rates ranging from eight bits per pixel down to less than one bit per pixel in very fine steps. At any bit rate, texels can have from one to four color components. The system's flexibility results from a number of novel features. Color spaces and weights are represented using an encoding scheme that allows flexible allocation of bits between different types of information. The system uses bilinear interpolation to derive color space coordinates for a texel from sparse samples, and uses a procedural partition function to map texels to color spaces.