Deadband-based offline-coding of haptic media

In this work, a novel perceptual coding approach for offline compression of haptic media is presented. Our scheme exploits the properties of human haptic perception and hides coding artifacts introduced by lossy compression below the human perception thresholds. We combine the concept of Just Noticeable Differences with predictive coding in order to achieve high coding efficiency without impairing user perception. In our experiments, we apply the proposed lossy compression scheme to haptic data that has been recorded during a telemanipulation session in a virtual environment. Our user studies reveal that our approach leads to strong data reduction up to 100:1 while preserving a high-quality haptic experience during playback of the compressed haptic data streams.