Video-based compression for plenoptic point clouds

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel video-based compression method for plenoptic point clouds, leveraging multiview high efficiency video coding and a block-based padding technique to significantly reduce bitrate compared to existing methods.

Contribution

It extends V-PCC to support plenoptic point clouds by generating multiple attribute videos and encodes them using multiview HEVC, achieving better compression efficiency.

Findings

Significant bitrate savings over state-of-the-art methods.

Effective use of multiview correlations in attribute videos.

Proposed padding method reduces bit cost of unoccupied pixels.

Abstract

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, no works have used a video-based solution to compress the plenoptic point cloud yet. In this paper, we first extend the V-PCC to support the plenoptic point cloud compression by generating multiple attribute videos. Then based on the observation that these videos from multiple views have very high correlations, we propose encoding them using multiview high efficiency video coding. We further propose a block-based padding method that unifies the unoccupied attribute pixels from different views to reduce their bit cost. The proposed algorithms are implemented in the V-PCC reference software. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms can bring significant bitrate savings compared with the state-of-the-art method for plenoptic point cloud compression.