The high storage requirements associated with point rendering

applications make the utilization of data compression

techniques interesting. Point rendering has been proposed only recently and,

consequently, no compression strategies have yet been developed.

In this paper we present compression algorithms for two specific

data distributions widely used in point rendering: a naive

distribution with no specific sorting of the points and a layer

distribution which is suitable for incremental algorithms. In this

last case points are sorted in layers and the connectivity among

them is encoded. The algorithms we propose have a high compression

rate (5.0 bits/point for the naive distribution and 7.7

bits/point for the layer distribution).

Additionally we present the hardware implementation for the

decompression of both algorithms. Both algorithms are implemented

in a single hardware unit providing a control to select between

them.