Range image compression using the fan algorithm

Range images, which are a representation of the surface of a 3-D object, are gaining popularity in many applications including CAD/CAM, multimedia and virtual reality. There is, thus, a need for compression of these 3-D images. Current standards, such as JPEG, are not appropriate for such images, due to their very nature. This has led us to develop a new compression method for range images. It approximates raster lines by many straight line segments within a user-specified maximum tolerance level. The extremities of the straight-line segments are non-redundant points (NRPs). Huffman coding, with a fixed Huffman tree, is used to encode the horizontal distance between the NRPs and their altitudes. The algorithm performance is illustrated on range images acquired at the Institute for Information Technology, National Research Council of Canada