Directed acyclic graph encoding for compressed shadow maps

Abstract

Detailed shadows in large-scale environments are challenging. Our approach enables efficient detailed shadow computations for static environments at a low memory cost. It builds upon compressed precomputed multiresolution hierarchies but uses a directed acyclic graph to encode its tree structure. Further, depth values are compressed and stored separately and we use a bit-plane encoding for the lower tree levels entries in order to further reduce memory requirements and increase locality. We achieve between 20% to 50% improved compression rates, while retaining high performance.