Efficient compression method reduces memory for 3D rotation data
Compression of Uniformly Distributed Unit Quaternions
Graphics
Summary
3D rotations in graphics are often stored using unit quaternions, but these can take up a lot of memory and bandwidth. The authors studied different ways to represent and compress these quaternions when they are evenly spread out. They found a new compression approach using a special infinity-norm method combined with a warp function that minimizes errors and uses less storage. This method decompresses quickly and works well in practical graphics tasks like animation and texture mapping.
What this means in practice
- •For computer graphics developers: Compress rotation data in animations and normal maps to reduce memory and bandwidth use without sacrificing accuracy.
- •For game engine engineers: Implement the optimized quaternion compression to improve real-time rendering performance by lowering decompression costs.
Authors
Carsten Faber, Bastian Kuth, Rinaldo Schuster, Daniel Pauls, Quirin Meyer
Abstract
Unit quaternions are widely used in computer graphics making their efficient compression critical for reducing memory consumption and bandwidth requirements. In this paper, we present a novel method for encoding uniformly distributed unit quaternions. Our thorough analysis of several quaternion parameterizations compares their theoretical error properties, quantization behavior, computational cost, and memory efficiency and provides both an analytical and empirical characterization. We show that an infinity-norm parameterization with our optimized warp function consistently offers the smallest maximum error and the best storage efficiency, at a decompression cost equal to or lower than that of parameterization methods found in practice. We demonstrate the practical benefits of the proposed approach in several graphics applications, including tangent-space normal mapping, skeletal animation with blend weights, and Gaussian splatting.