Hybrid pyramidal/vector-quantized volume compression

Compression and decompression of volume data is gaining increasing importance, especially with wide use of volume visualization techniques in distributed environments. Hitherto researchers have used direct extensions of still-image and video compression techniques to volume data, but these are associated with limitations of scalar quantization. We present an Orientation Band (ORB) technique for volume compression that exploits orientation information, and consequently preserves structure within the data. The ORB scheme uses a hybrid of lossless (pyramidal) and lossy (vector quantized) techniques to compress within user-specified space and error bounds. The resulting compressed volumes are suited for progressive network transmission and for fast volume rendering.