Progressive lossless compression of volumetric data using small memory load

This paper introduces a new method for the compression of volumetric datasets. It is based on quadtree encoding. This method consists of three steps: during initialization, a so-called division quadtree is built. The smallest, unit of the division quadtree is called a basic macro-block. A Boolean intersection is built on pairs of quadtrees during the processing phase and the differences are stored. In the last phase, variable length encoding is applied to reduce entropy among the differences. This method has been compared with the popular octree-based method and gives, in general, better compression results. In addition, this method can be realized using small on-board memory.