A Rate Control Algorithm for Video-based Point Cloud Compression

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel rate control algorithm for video-based point cloud compression that optimizes bit allocation between geometry and color videos, significantly enhancing compression efficiency.

Contribution

It presents a new rate control algorithm tailored for V-PCC's all-intra configuration, including an optimization model and a two-pass HEVC method for improved accuracy.

Findings

Outperforms non-rate-controlled V-PCC in R-D performance

Achieves only 0.43% bitrate error

Enhances rate control accuracy with a two-pass HEVC method

Abstract

Video-based point cloud compression (V-PCC) has been an emerging compression technology that projects the 3D point cloud into a 2D plane and uses high efficiency video coding (HEVC) to encode the projected 2D videos (geometry video and color video). In this work, we propose a rate control algorithm for the all-intra (AI) configuration of V-PCC. Specifically, based on the quality-dependency existing in the projected videos, we develop an optimization formulation to allocate target bits between the geometry video and the color video. Furthermore, we design a two-pass method for HEVC to adapt to the new characteristics of projected videos, which significantly improves the accuracy of rate control. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms V-PCC without rate control in R-D performance with just 0.43% bitrate error.