Real-time Rendering with Wavelet-Compressed Multi-Dimensional Datasets on the GPU

We present a method for using large, high dimension and high dynamic range datasets on modern graphics hardware. Datasets are preprocessed with a discrete wavelet transform, insignificant coefficients are removed, and the resulting compressed data is stored in standard 2D texture memory. A set of drop-in shader functions allows any shader program to sample the wavelet-encoded textures without additional programming. We demonstrate our technique in three applications – a terrain renderer with a 163842 sample RGB texture map, a volume renderer with a 5123 sample 3D dataset, and a complex material shader using an unapproximated BRDF dataset, sampled at 644 in RGB.