ZTE Communications ›› 2023, Vol. 21 ›› Issue (4): 17-28.DOI: 10.12142/ZTECOM.202304003

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Spatio-Temporal Context-Guided Algorithm for Lossless Point Cloud Geometry Compression

ZHANG Huiran1,2, DONG Zhen3(), WANG Mingsheng1,2   

  1. 1.Guangzhou Urban Planning and Design Survey Research Institute, Guangzhou 510060, China
    2.Guangdong Enterprise Key Laboratory for Urban Sensing, Monitoring and Early Warning, Guangzhou 510060, China
    3.State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China
  • Received:2023-09-11 Online:2023-12-07 Published:2023-12-07
  • About author:ZHANG Huiran received her BE and ME degrees in School of Geodesy and Geomatics and State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying Mapping and Remote Sensing, both from Wuhan University, China in 2020 and 2023, respectively. She is currently the surveyor of Guangzhou Urban Planning and Design Survey Research Institute, China. Her research interests include point cloud data processing and compression. She participated in several projects related to the field of remote sensing and published one paper in Geomatics and Information Science of Wuhan University.
    DONG Zhen (dongzhenwhu@whu.edu.cn) received his BE and PhD degrees in remote sensing and photogrammetry from Wuhan University, China in 2011 and 2018, respectively. He is a professor with the State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing (LIESMARS), Wuhan University. His research interests include 3D reconstruction, scene understanding, point cloud processing as well as their applications in intelligent transportation system, digital twin cities, urban sustainable development and robotics. He received over 10 honors from various national and international competitions and published around 60 papers in various journals and conferences.
    WANG Mingsheng received his BE degree in College of Computer Science and Technology from Jilin University, China in 2001, and ME degree in School of Computer Science and Engineering from South China University of Technology, China in 2004. He is currently a senior engineer with Guangzhou Urban Planning & Design Survey Research Institute, China. His research interests include computer applications and software, physiography, and surveying. He received over 20 honors from various national competitions and published around 50 papers in various journals and conferences.

Abstract:

Point cloud compression is critical to deploy 3D representation of the physical world such as 3D immersive telepresence, autonomous driving, and cultural heritage preservation. However, point cloud data are distributed irregularly and discontinuously in spatial and temporal domains, where redundant unoccupied voxels and weak correlations in 3D space make achieving efficient compression a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a spatio-temporal context-guided algorithm for lossless point cloud geometry compression. The proposed scheme starts with dividing the point cloud into sliced layers of unit thickness along the longest axis. Then, it introduces a prediction method where both intra-frame and inter-frame point clouds are available, by determining correspondences between adjacent layers and estimating the shortest path using the travelling salesman algorithm. Finally, the few prediction residual is efficiently compressed with optimal context-guided and adaptive fast-mode arithmetic coding techniques. Experiments prove that the proposed method can effectively achieve low bit rate lossless compression of point cloud geometric information, and is suitable for 3D point cloud compression applicable to various types of scenes.

Key words: point cloud geometry compression, single-frame point clouds, multi-frame point clouds, predictive coding, arithmetic coding