A Compression Method for Arbitrary Precision Floating-Point Images

Abstract

The paper proposes a method of compressing floating-point images of arbitrary precision. The concept of floating point images is used frequently in such areas as high dynamic range imaging, where pixel data stored as 8 or 12-bit integers are insufficient. The compression scheme presented in the paper organizes the floating point data in a manner such that already existing compression algorithms such as JPEG or Zlib compression may be used once the data re-organization has taken place. The paper compares the result to a popular (but restrictive) form of image compression, openEXR, and shows significant gains over this format. Furthermore, the compression scheme presented is scalable to deal with floating point images of arbitrary precision.