  Three-dimensional (3D) shape measurement devices and techniques are being
rapidly adopted within a variety of industries and applications. As acquiring
3D range data becomes faster and more accurate it becomes more challenging to
efficiently store, transmit, or stream this data. One prevailing approach to
compressing 3D range data is to encode it within the color channels of regular
2D images. This paper presents a novel method for reducing the depth range of a
3D geometry such that it can be stored within a 2D image using lower encoding
frequencies (or a fewer number of encoding periods). This allows for smaller
compressed file sizes to be achieved without a proportional increase in
reconstruction errors. Further, as the proposed method occurs prior to
encoding, it is readily compatible with a variety of existing image-based 3D
range geometry compression methods.
