Point Cloud Compression

Abstract

The fast developments of 3D vision technologies and applications have raised the great interests from both the academia and industry communities.3D point clouds can have the strong capability of providing immersive visual experience and highprecision 3D modeling of scenes.We have witnessed the significant progress of compression, processing, and analysis technologies for point clouds.Especially, the available limited bandwidth always restricts the storage and transmission of point clouds, and efficient compression and streaming technologies have been explored broadly.Similar to big image and video data, the huge amount of data of point clouds require more efficient compression algorithms to obtain a desirable rate-distortion tradeoff.Standardization organizations (e.g., MPEG, JPEG, AVS, etc.) and corporations have invested many efforts to develop the non-learning and learning methods to better exploit redundancies for compressing the massive point cloud data.The quality improvements from point cloud compression with constrained bandwidth play a critical role in boosting the application utilities of point clouds in the wild.This book contains 11 chapters, where the first two chapters give the introduction and background knowledge, and the last chapter discusses the future works of point cloud technologies.Chapters 3-10, which are the main part of this book, focus on the key technologies and standards in point cloud compression.Among these chapters, Chaps.3-6 present the fundamental knowledge about compression technologies, such as prediction coding, transform coding, quantization techniques, and entropy coding.Chapters 7-10 discuss the MPEG and AVS standards for point cloud compression, such as MPEG V-PCC, MPEG G-PCC, AVS PCC, and the ongoing AI-based PCC.Chapter 1 introduces the basic concepts of point clouds, acquisition equipment, representative datasets, typical application fields, development trends, and challenges.Chapter 2 mainly focuses on the background knowledge of point cloud compression, which starts with the fundamentals of information theory.Afterward, point cloud compression technologies are generally introduced.Additionally, point cloud quality evaluation methods are also described.v vi Preface Chapters 3-6 are technical chapters on the main coding tools, including prediction, transform, quantization, and entropy coding for the efficient compression of point clouds.Chapter 7 describes the MPEG standard for geometry-based point cloud compression (MPEG G-PCC), including the coding scheme, geometry coding, attribute coding, quantization, entropy coding techniques, and emerging standard activities.Chapter 8 presents the AVS standard for point cloud compression (AVS PCC), which begins with a brief introduction of the AVS point cloud compression standard timeline and synopsis.Afterward, the geometry octree, geometry predictive tree, attribute prediction, attribute transform, and attribute entropy coding are discussed in detail.Chapter 9 introduces the MPEG standard for video-based point cloud compression (MPEG V-PCC), including the encoding and decoding frameworks of V-PCC, point cloud projection approach, and projected video compression methods.Chapter 10 focuses on the deep learning-based point cloud compression methods, including the basic principles, the related neural network design and optimization methods, and the MPEG AI-3DGC standard.Note that the China AVS working group has established a group working on the standardization efforts for AI-based PCC in 2023.Chapter 11 summarizes future works on point cloud technologies from different technical perspectives, including the main coding tools, MPEG G-PCC standard, AVS point cloud compression standard, MPEG V-PCC standard, and deep Learningbased point cloud compression technologies.This book analyzes and presents the advanced point cloud compression technologies, which have shown significant progresses in recent years.As a textbook on 3D point cloud compression technologies and standardization, this book comprises the above selected chapters.Through the progressive presentation, readers can comprehensively understand and master the basic knowledge, the main techniques, and the development trends of point cloud compression.To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive compilation of all aspects of point cloud compression technologies, as well as the standardization efforts.We hope you enjoy this book and join the growing community of point cloud compression enthusiasts.

Topics & Concepts