Level-of-Detail Generation Using Binary-Tree for Lifting Scheme in LiDAR Point Cloud Attributes Coding

Abstract

Point clouds are one of the emerging 3D visual representations of real word and plenty of useful applications has already been demonstrated. However, a huge amount of data associated with it has added challenges in both transmission and storage. This requires an efficient coding solution and brought a great attention among compression community. MPEG and JPEG standardization group has already started developing coding solution and proposed two test-models namely V-PCC, video-based coding solution, for dynamic point cloud and G-PCC, a native geometry-based coding solution, for static and LiDAR point cloud. In G-PCC, octree (lossless) and tri-soup(lossy) for geometry coding, similarly regional adaptive hierarchical transform (RAHT) and lifting-scheme for attributes coding are currently being explored. Lifting-scheme relies on level-of-details(LOD) structure for attributes prediction where LOD is generated with distance based subsampling approach. In this work we proposed a new LOD generation scheme using binary-tree and showed it provides better coding solution for sparse point cloud such as LiDAR. The experimental results demonstrated 12% bitrate reduction for reflectance and 8%, 6% and 7% bitrate reduction for luma, chroma Cb and chroma Cr respectively as well as up to 4 times computational complexity reduction compared to current G-PCC lifting-scheme.