Abstract
Normal maps play an important role in realistic 3D image rendering to express pseudo roughness of the surface with small amount of polygon data. In this paper, an efficient normal map compression algorithm is proposed based on vector quantization. Using the unity condition of normal maps, compression ratio has been made much better than conventional approaches. In addition, the encoding time has been made reasonable by considering the unity condition and the distribution of the data. The compression algorithm developed in this paper is also compatible with hardware accelerators.
