Point cloud compression relies on techniques to compress both geometry and attributes. Motion-based approaches for dynamic solid point cloud geometry compression within the geometry-based point cloud compression (G-PCC) framework have achieved significant reductions in geometry rate. However, motion-based techniques for attribute compression remain underexplored, making it challenging to achieve significant reductions in the temporal redundancy of attributes. Firstly, this paper proposes a geometry-based inter-coding scheme to compress the attributes of dynamic solid point clouds. Secondly, a graph-based motion-estimation scheme for point-cloud attribute compression is proposed. Thirdly, an interpolation-free fractional-voxel motion estimation method is proposed to refine motion accuracy to fractional-voxel precision. Our experimental results on the MPEG point cloud dataset show that the proposed scheme outperforms G-PCC, GeS-TM, and V-PCC in lossless and lossy geometry conditions. We achieve average bitrate savings of $55.3\%$, $42.3\%$, and $16.5\%$ over G-PCC, GeS-TM, and V-PCC, respectively, under lossy-geometry conditions.
Efficient Dynamic-NeRF Based Volumetric Video Coding with Rate Distortion Optimization
Institute of Image Communication and Network Engineering（图像通信与网络工程研究所）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；College of Electronics and Information Engineering（电子信息工程学院）；Sichuan University（四川大学）
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）
Volumetric image compression has become an urgent task to effectively transmit and store images produced in biological research and clinical practice. At present, the most commonly used volumetric image compression methods are based on wavelet transform, such as JP3D. However, JP3D employs an ideal, separable, global, and fixed wavelet basis to convert input images from pixel domain to frequency domain, which seriously limits its performance. In this paper, we first design a 3-D trained wavelet-like transform to enable signal-dependent and non-separable transform. Then, an affine wavelet basis…
Compression of point clouds has so far been confined to coding the positions of a discrete set of points in space and the attributes of those discrete points. We introduce an alternative approach based on volumetric functions, which are functions defined not just on a finite set of points, but throughout space. As in regression analysis, volumetric functions are continuous functions that are able to interpolate values on a finite set of points as linear combinations of continuous basis functions. Using a B-spline wavelet basis, we are able to code volumetric functions representing both geometr…
Due to the diverse sparsity, high dimensionality, and large temporal variation of dynamic point clouds, it remains a challenge to design an efficient point cloud compression method. We propose to code the geometry of a given point cloud by learning a neural volumetric field. Instead of representing the entire point cloud using a single overfit network, we divide the entire space into small cubes and represent each non-empty cube by a neural network and an input latent code. The network is shared among all the cubes in a single frame or multiple frames, to exploit the spatial and temporal redun…
Practical Lossless Volumetric Medical Image Compression via Tri-plane Context Tree Learning
Faculty of Computing, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学计算学部）；School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学电子工程与计算机科学学院）；Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Huawei Tech. Company, Ltd.（华为技术有限公司）
We consider the attributes of a point cloud as samples of a vector-valued volumetric function at discrete positions. To compress the attributes given the positions, we compress the parameters of the volumetric function. We model the volumetric function by tiling space into blocks, and representing the function over each block by shifts of a coordinate-based, or implicit, neural network. Inputs to the network include both spatial coordinates and a latent vector per block. We represent the latent vectors using coefficients of the region-adaptive hierarchical transform (RAHT) used in the MPEG geo…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；The Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学深圳校区）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Information Engineering University（信息工程大学）；Shanghai Jiaotong University（上海交通大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）
We study the problem of attribute compression for large-scale unstructured 3D point clouds. Through an in-depth exploration of the relationships between different encoding steps and different attribute channels, we introduce a deep compression network, termed 3DAC, to explicitly compress the attributes of 3D point clouds and reduce storage usage in this paper. Specifically, the point cloud attributes such as color and reflectance are firstly converted to transform coefficients. We then propose a deep entropy model to model the probabilities of these coefficients by considering information hidd…
In point cloud compression, exploiting temporal redundancy for inter predictive coding is challenging because of the irregular geometry. This paper proposes an efficient block-based inter-coding scheme for color attribute compression. The scheme includes integer-precision motion estimation and an adaptive graph based in-loop filtering scheme for improved attribute prediction. The proposed block-based motion estimation scheme consists of an initial motion search that exploits geometric and color attributes, followed by a motion refinement that only minimizes color prediction error. To further i…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Shanghai Jiaotong University（上海交通大学）
With the development of the 3D data acquisition facilities, the increasing scale of acquired 3D point clouds poses a challenge to the existing data compression techniques. Although promising performance has been achieved in static point cloud compression, it remains under-explored and challenging to leverage temporal correlations within a point cloud sequence for effective dynamic point cloud compression. In this paper, we study the attribute (e.g., color) compression of dynamic point clouds and present a learning-based framework, termed 4DAC. To reduce temporal redundancy within data, we firs…
Point clouds have recently gained interest, especially for real-time applications and for 3D-scanned material, such as is used in autonomous driving, architecture, and engineering, to model real estate for renovation or display. Point clouds are associated with geometry information and attributes such as color. Be the color unique or direction-dependent (in the case of plenoptic point clouds), it reflects the colors observed by cameras displaced around the object. Hence, not only are the viewing references assumed, but the illumination spectrum and illumination geometry is also implicit. We pr…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Geometry-based point cloud compression (G-PCC) can achieve remarkable compression efficiency for point clouds. However, it still leads to serious attribute compression artifacts, especially under low bitrate scenarios. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Scale Graph Attention Network (MS-GAT) to remove the artifacts of point cloud attributes compressed by G-PCC. We first construct a graph based on point cloud geometry coordinates and then use the Chebyshev graph convolutions to extract features of point cloud attributes. Considering that one point may be correlated with points both near and far …
Hangzhou Normal University（杭州师范大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
A learning-based adaptive loop filter is developed for the Geometry-based Point Cloud Compression (G-PCC) standard to reduce attribute compression artifacts. The proposed method first generates multiple Most-Probable Sample Offsets (MPSOs) as potential compression distortion approximations, and then linearly weights them for artifact mitigation. As such, we drive the filtered reconstruction as close to the uncompressed PCA as possible. To this end, we devise a Compression Artifact Reduction Network (CARNet) which consists of two consecutive processing phases: MPSOs derivation and MPSOs combina…
DALD-PCAC: Density-Adaptive Learning Descriptor for Point Cloud Lossless Attribute Compression
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School（北京大学深圳研究生院）；University of Missouri-Kansas City（密苏里大学-堪萨斯城分校）；Tencent Media Laboratory（腾讯媒体实验室）
The rise of capturing systems for objects and scenes in 3D with increased fidelity and immersion has led to the popularity of volumetric video contents that can be seen from any position and angle in 6 degrees of freedom navigation. Such contents need large volumes of data to accurately represent the real world. Thus, novel optimization solutions and delivery systems are needed to enable volumetric video streaming over bandwidth-limited networks. In this chapter, we discuss theoretical approaches to volumetric video streaming optimization, through compression solutions, as well as network and …
The sparse LiDAR point clouds become more and more popular in various applications, e.g., the autonomous driving. However, for this type of data, there exists much under-explored space in the corresponding compression framework proposed by MPEG, i.e., geometry-based point cloud compression (G-PCC). In G-PCC, only the distance-based similarity is considered in the intra prediction for the attribute compression. In this paper, we propose a normal-based intra prediction scheme, which provides a more efficient lossless attribute compression by introducing the normals of point clouds. The angle bet…
This work extends the multiscale structure originally developed for point cloud geometry compression to point cloud attribute compression. To losslessly encode the attribute while maintaining a low bitrate, accurate probability prediction is critical. With this aim, we extensively exploit cross-scale, cross-group, and cross-color correlations of point cloud attribute to ensure accurate probability estimation and thus high coding efficiency. Specifically, we first generate multiscale attribute tensors through average pooling, by which, for any two consecutive scales, the decoded lower-scale att…
Att2CPC: Attention-Guided Lossy Attribute Compression of Point Clouds
College of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Computing and Mathematics, Charles Sturt University（查尔斯斯特大学计算与数学学院）
In recent years, several point cloud geometry compression methods that utilize advanced deep learning techniques have been proposed, but there are limited works on attribute compression, especially lossless compression. In this work, we build an end-to-end multiscale point cloud attribute coding method (MNeT) that progressively projects the attributes onto multiscale latent spaces. The multiscale architecture provides an accurate context for the attribute probability modeling and thus minimizes the coding bitrate with a single network prediction. Besides, our method allows scalable coding that…
Recently, numerous learning-based compression methods have been developed with outstanding performance for the coding of the geometry information of point clouds. On the contrary, limited explorations have been devoted to point cloud attribute compression (PCAC). Thus, this study focuses on the PCAC by applying sparse convolution because of its superior efficiency for representing the geometry of unorganized points. The proposed method simply stacks sparse convolutions to construct the variational autoencoder (VAE) framework to compress the color attributes of a given point cloud. To better en…
Peng Cheng Lab（鹏程实验室）；Peking University, Shenzhen Graduate School（北京大学深圳研究生院）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
Inspired by the recently proposed successive subspace learning (SSL) principles, we develop a successive subspace graph transform (SSGT) to address point cloud attribute compression in this work. The octree geometry structure is utilized to partition the point cloud, where every node of the octree represents a point cloud subspace with a certain spatial size. We design a weighted graph with self-loop to describe the subspace and define a graph Fourier transform based on the normalized graph Laplacian. The transforms are applied to large point clouds from the leaf nodes to the root node of the …
Nanjing University（南京大学）；Hangzhou Normal University（杭州师范大学）；University of Missouri（密苏里大学）
Recent years have witnessed the growth of point cloud based applications because of its realistic and fine-grained representation of 3D objects and scenes. However, it is a challenging problem to compress sparse, unstructured, and high-precision 3D points for efficient communication. In this paper, leveraging the sparsity nature of point cloud, we propose a multiscale end-to-end learning framework which hierarchically reconstructs the 3D Point Cloud Geometry (PCG) via progressive re-sampling. The framework is developed on top of a sparse convolution based autoencoder for point cloud compressio…
In this paper, we propose a reduced reference (RR) point cloud quality assessment (PCQA) model named R-PCQA to quantify the distortions introduced by the lossy compression. Specifically, we use the attribute and geometry quantization steps of different compression methods (i.e., V-PCC, G-PCC and AVS) to infer the point cloud quality, assuming that the point clouds have no other distortions before compression. First, we analyze the compression distortion of point clouds under separate attribute compression and geometry compression to avoid their mutual masking, for which we consider 5 point clo…
SPAC: Sampling-based Progressive Attribute Compression for Dense Point Clouds
School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University（山东大学控制科学与工程学院）；School of Engineering and Sustainable Development, De Montfort University（德蒙福特大学工程与可持续发展学院）；School of Data Science, Lingnan University（岭南大学数据科学学院）
Existing techniques to compress point cloud attributes leverage either geometric or video-based compression tools. We explore a radically different approach inspired by recent advances in point cloud representation learning. Point clouds can be interpreted as 2D manifolds in 3D space. Specifically, we fold a 2D grid onto a point cloud and we map attributes from the point cloud onto the folded 2D grid using a novel optimized mapping method. This mapping results in an image, which opens a way to apply existing image processing techniques on point cloud attributes. However, as this mapping proces…
CAGS: Color-Adaptive Volumetric Video Streaming with Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting
Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）；Jiangxing Intelligence Inc.（江行智能有限公司）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Nankai University（南开大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；Fuzhou University（福州大学）；Southeast University（东南大学）
We present an efficient voxelization method to encode the geometry and attributes of 3D point clouds obtained from autonomous vehicles. Due to the circular scanning trajectory of sensors, the geometry of LiDAR point clouds is inherently different from that of point clouds captured from RGBD cameras. Our method exploits these specific properties to representing points in cylindrical coordinates instead of conventional Cartesian coordinates. We demonstrate thatRegion Adaptive Hierarchical Transform (RAHT) can be extended to this setting, leading to attribute encoding based on a volumetric partit…
This paper describes a quality assessment model for perceptual video compression applications (PVM), which stimulates visual masking and distortion-artefact perception using an adaptive combination of noticeable distortions and blurring artefacts. The method shows significant improvement over existing quality metrics based on the VQEG database, and provides compatibility with in-loop rate-quality optimisation for next generation video codecs due to its latency and complexity attributes. Performance comparison are validated against a range of different distortion types.
The plenoptic point cloud that has multiple colors from various directions, is a more complete representation than the general point cloud that usually has only one color. It is more realistic but also brings a larger volume of data that needs to be compressed efficiently. The state-of-the-art method to compress the plenoptic point cloud is an extension of the region-based adaptive hierarchical transform (RAHT). As far as we can see, in addition to RAHT, the video-based point cloud compression (V-PCC) is also an efficient point cloud compression method. However, to the best of our knowledge, n…
