Tangent Space Normal Mapping without storing Tangents

After experimenting with the tangent space normal maps, it turned out that its possible to compute the tangent space in the vertex shader quite fast, which saves memory and bandwidth for rendering. Since the light computation is in camera space, tangent and co-tangent can be approximated as follows in the vertex shader:

VS

normal = normalize((gl_ModelViewMatrix* vec4(gl_Normal.xyz,0.0)).xyz);
tex_tan = cross(normal.xyz,vec3(0,-1,0));
tex_cotan = cross(normal.xyz,tex_tan);
tex_uv = gl_MultiTexCoord0.xy;

For the fragment shader, we need to first get the direction of the texturing by using the derivatives before we can compute the pertubed normal vector as follows:

FS

vec3 bump=vec3(-1.0,-1.0,-1.0)+2.0*texture2D(texBump,tex_uv).xyz;
vec2 tdx=normalize(dFdx(tex_uv));  // tex coord derivative in x
vec2 tdy=normalize(dFdy(tex_uv));  // tex coord derivative in y
vec3 n =bump.z*normal              // Z-direction of the normalmap
       +bump.x*(tdx.x*tex_tan+tdx.y*tex_cotan) // X-direction 
       +bump.y*(tdy.x*tex_tan+tdy.y*tex_cotan);// Y-direction 
n=normalize(n);

Its obviously an approximation, but so far I am satisfied with the result.
Note that mirrored UV's will need special treatment which is not included above.

Update: Using the geometry shader for computing the (tdx.x*tex_tan+tdx.y*tex_cotan) terms might improve the performance.