gpcgc: a green point cloud geometry coding method

TL;DR

GPCGC is a low-complexity, progressive point cloud geometry coding method that efficiently encodes 3D coordinates using hierarchical organization, image projection, and a novel low-complexity image codec, achieving competitive performance with lower complexity.

Contribution

The paper introduces GPCGC, a new point cloud compression method combining hierarchical octree, image projection, and a low-complexity image codec, reducing complexity while maintaining competitive quality.

Findings

Achieves comparable compression performance to MPEG standards.

Significantly lower complexity than HEVC-Intra-based methods.

Provides a progressive coding scheme for static point clouds.

Abstract

A low-complexity point cloud compression method called the Green Point Cloud Geometry Codec (GPCGC), is proposed to encode the 3D spatial coordinates of static point clouds efficiently. GPCGC consists of two modules. In the first module, point coordinates of input point clouds are hierarchically organized into an octree structure. Points at each leaf node are projected along one of three axes to yield image maps. In the second module, the occupancy map is clustered into 9 modes while the depth map is coded by a low-complexity high-efficiency image codec, called the green image codec (GIC). GIC is a multi-resolution codec based on vector quantization (VQ). Its complexity is significantly lower than HEVC-Intra. Furthermore, the rate-distortion optimization (RDO) technique is used to select the optimal coding parameters. GPCGC is a progressive codec, and it offers a coding performance competitive with MPEG's V-PCC and G-PCC standards at significantly lower complexity.