Three-bit representation of three-dimensional range data.

Our previous research has shown that 3D range data sizes can be substantially reduced if they are converted into regular 2D images using the Holoimage technique. Yet, this technique requires all 24 bits of a standard image to represent one 3D point, making it impossible for a regular 2D image to carry 2D texture information as well. This paper proposes an approach to represent 3D range data with 3 bits, further reducing the data size. We demonstrate that more than an 8.2:1 compression ratio can be achieved with compression root-mean-square error of only 0.34%. Moreover, we can use another bit to represent a black-and-white 2D texture, and thus both 3D data and 2D texture images can be stored into an 8 bit grayscale image. Both simulation and experiments are presented to verify the performance of the proposed technique.