Compression of arbitrary cutting planes

Abstract

Summary form only given. We present an efficient algorithm for compressing the data necessary to represent an arbitrary cutting plane extracted from a three-dimensional curvilinear data set. The cutting plane technique is an important visualization method for time-varying 3D simulation results since the data sets are often so large. An efficient compression algorithm for these cutting planes is especially important when the simulation running on a remote server is being tracked or the data set is stored on a remote server. Various aspects of the visualization process are considered in the algorithm design, such as the inherent data reduction in going from 3D to 2D when generating a cutting plane, the numerical accuracy required in the cutting plane, and the potential to decimate the triangle mesh. After separating each floating point number into mantissa and exponent, a block sorting algorithm and an entropy coding algorithm are used to perform lossless compression.