Modern computing and imaging technologies have allowed for many recent advances to be made in the field of 3D range imaging: range data can now be acquired at speeds much faster than real-time, with sub-millimeter precision. However, these benefits come at the cost of an increased quantity of data being generated by 3D range imaging systems, potentially limiting the number of applications that can take advantage of this technology. One common approach to the compression of 3D range data is to encode it within the three color channels of a traditional 24-bit RGB image. This paper presents a novel method for the modification and compression of 3D range data such that the original depth information can be stored within, and recovered from, only two channels of a traditional 2D RGB image. Storage within a traditional image format allows for further compression to be realized via lossless or lossy image compression techniques. For example, when JPEG 80 is used to store the encoded output image, this method achieves an 18.2% reduction in file size when compared to a similar three-channel, image-base compression method, with only a corresponding 0.17% reduction in global reconstruction accuracy.

现代计算和成像技术使 3D 距离成像领域取得了许多最新进展：现在可以以远快于实时的速度获取距离数据，精度达到亚毫米。然而，这些好处是以 3D 距离成像系统生成的数据量增加为代价的，这可能会限制可以利用该技术的应用程序的数量。压缩 3D 范围数据的一种常见方法是在传统 24 位 RGB 图像的三个颜色通道内对其进行编码。本文提出了一种修改和压缩 3D 范围数据的新方法，使得原始深度信息可以存储在传统 2D RGB 图像的两个通道中并从中恢复。传统图像格式中的存储允许通过无损或有损图像压缩技术实现进一步压缩。例如，当使用 JPEG 80 存储编码的输出图像时，与类似的三通道、基于图像的压缩方法相比，该方法实现了 18.2% 的文件大小减少，而全局重建仅相应减少了 0.17%准确性。