A Generic Scheme for Progressive Point Cloud Coding

In this paper, we propose a generic point cloud encoder that provides a unified framework for compressing different attributes of point samples corresponding to 3D objects with an arbitrary topology. In the proposed scheme, the coding process is led by an iterative octree cell subdivision of the object space. At each level of subdivision, the positions of point samples are approximated by the geometry centers of all tree-front cells, whereas normals and colors are approximated by their statistical average within each of the tree-front cells. With this framework, we employ attribute-dependent encoding techniques to exploit the different characteristics of various attributes. All of these have led to a significant improvement in the rate-distortion (R-D) performance and a computational advantage over the state of the art. Furthermore, given sufficient levels of octree expansion, normal space partitioning, and resolution of color quantization, the proposed point cloud encoder can be potentially used for lossless coding of 3D point clouds.

1 Introduction

Three-dimensionalmodels find applications in many fields such as gaming, animation, and scientific visualization. With the increasing capability of 3D data acquisition devices and computing machines, it is relatively easy to produce digitized 3D models with millions of points. The increase in both availability and complexity of 3D digital models makes it critical to efficiently compress the data so that they can be stored, transmitted, processed, and rendered efficiently.