Three-dimensional profile data compression based on composite dithering technique

The size of three dimensional (3D) profile data is too large for the 3D digital museum to properly transmit and display in real time. To solve the problem, this paper proposes a 3D profile data compression method based on composite dithering technique. Firstly, 3D profile data are stored into 24 bit image by utilizing the virtual structured-light projection system. Then, different dithering methods are applied to the different channels of the image, and the results are saved into the three most significant bits of the 8 bit grayscale image or three 1 bit logical images, to achieve a further compression of 3D profile data. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a compression ratio up to 75.9∶1 compared with the provided 3D model format, and is very suitable for real-time transmission, reconstruction and display of 3D profile data.