Two-channel high-accuracy Holoimage technique for three-dimensional data compression

Abstract Three-dimensional (3D) shape data sizes can be substantially reduced using the Holoimage technique which converts the 3D shape data into regular 24-bit 2D images. However, the Holoimage technique generally takes up all the three standard image channels (RGB) and leave no room in an image to store other information, such as a texture or a normal map. Meanwhile, the recovered 3D accuracy is not very high due to the rounding process of image storage. To overcome these problems, this paper first proposes a two-channel Holoimage technique to compress 3D data and thus leave one more channel for storing other information. In addition, a novel phase-error compensation approach is also presented to enhance the recovered accuracy for Holoimage techniques. Without adding anymore bits, the error compensation approach can greatly improve the 3D recovered accuracy. Experimental results are presented to verify the performance of the proposed methods.