Patent Application
20150009205
1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to Ericsson Texture Compression, and more particularly to a method of performing a dithering process on images before performing an Ericsson Texture Compression 1 process for improving the quality of resulting images.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The original version of the Ericsson Texture Compression (ETC) compression scheme is referred to as Ericsson Texture Compression 1 (ETC1), and was first developed in 2005. The ETC1 compression scheme compresses 24-bit RGB data by a factor of six. In 24-bit RGB data, eight bits of data are allocated for each of the red, green, and blue colors, which adds up to 24 bits in total.
The ETC1 compression scheme takes 4×4 groups of 24-bit pixel data and compresses each group into a single 64-bit word, thereby compressing the pixel data to be one-sixth of its original size.
However, the quality resulting from ETC1 compression is not good enough for images in many applications. There exists a need for an improved method of using ETC1 compression which produces higher quality images.
It is therefore one of the primary objectives of the claimed invention to provide an improved method for performing Ericsson Texture Compression.
According to an exemplary embodiment of the claimed invention, a method of improving Ericsson Texture Compression image quality is disclosed. The method includes providing an original image in the RGB color space, performing an image dithering process on the original image to produce a dithered image, and performing an Ericsson Texture Compression process on the dithered image to produce a compressed image.
These and other objectives of the present invention will no doubt become obvious to those of ordinary skill in the art after reading the following detailed description of the preferred embodiment that is illustrated in the various figures and drawings.
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Step 100: Start.
Step 102: The original image file 22 is provided to the image compressing device 10 by the user of the image compressing device 10. The original image file 22 is an RGB image. In a preferred embodiment, the original image file 22 is a 24-bit RGB image.
Step 104: A dithering process is performed on the original image file 22 by the dithering software 24 to produce a dithered image.
Step 106: An ETC1 encoding process is performed on the dithered image to produce the resulting compressed image 28.
Step 108: The resulting compressed image 28 is produced and output by the image compressing device 10.
Step 110: End.
Differing from the conventional method of performing ETC1 encoding on an image, the present invention first performs the dithering process, which is used to create the illusion of color depth in the dithered image. By first performing the dithering process on the original image file 22 before the dithered image is compressed using the ETC1 encoding process, the resulting compressed image 28 much more closely resembles the original image file 22 than would be the case if the dithering process was not used.
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Those skilled in the art will readily observe that numerous modifications and alterations of the device and method may be made while retaining the teachings of the invention. Accordingly, the above disclosure should be construed as limited only by the metes and bounds of the appended claims.
