Scalable texture compression using the wavelet transform

2D texture data represent one of the main data sources in 3D graphics, requiring large amounts of memory and bandwidth. Texture compression is of critical importance in this context to cope with these bottlenecks. To improve upon the available supported texture compression systems, several transform-based solutions have been proposed. These solutions, however, are not suitable for real-time texture sampling or provide insufficient image quality at medium to low rates. We propose a new scalable texture codec based on the 2D wavelet transform suitable for real-time rendering and filtering, using a new subband coding technique. The codec offers superior compression performance compared to the state-of-the-art, resolution scalability coupled with a wide variety of quality versus rate trade-offs as well as complexity scalability supported by the use of different wavelet filters.