Fast Random Access to Wavelet Compressed Volumetric Data Using Hashing

We present a new approach to lossy storage of the coefficients of wavelet transformed data. While it is common to store the coefficients of largest magnitude (and let all other coefficients be zero), we allow a slightly different set of coefficients to be stored. This brings into play a recently proposed hashing technique that allows space efficient storage and very efficient retrieval of coefficients. Our approach is applied to compression of volumetric data sets. For the ``Visible Man'' volume we obtain up to 80% improvement in compression ratio over previously suggested schemes. Further, the time for accessing a random voxel is quite competitive.