Patent ID: 9081681
Filing Date: 2015-07-14
Classification: G06F,G06T

Abstract:
1. A method for compressing normal maps in a computer system, comprising: accessing a map of input normals, said map of input normals comprising a plurality of normal vectors on a surface of an image; defining a memory block having a first portion and a second portion; storing a table of indices in the first portion of the memory block; and storing a table of normals in the second portion of the memory block, the normals in the second portion of the memory block comprising a subset of normals out of a set of unit normals of a quantized unit sphere, wherein the indices of the first portion of the memory block reference the normals of the second portion of the memory block, wherein the quantized unit sphere is quantized into points and the subset of normals is derived from a subset of the points selected to represent the map of input normals, further wherein the subset of the normals stored in the second portion of the memory block is selected by applying a compression algorithm to the set of unit normals of the quantized unit sphere according to a pre-defined metric for manipulating an average value corresponding to the unit normals.