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The large data volume of point clouds poses severe challenges for efficient storage and transmission in recent years. In this paper, we propose the first--to our best knowledge--end-to-end deep framework for compressing point cloud attributes. Specifically, we propose a point cloud lossy attribute autoencoder, which directly encodes and decodes point cloud attributes with the help of geometry, instead of voxelizing or projecting the points. In the autoencoder, we propose a second-order point convolution that utilizes the spatial correlations between more points and the nonlinear relationship between attribute features. We introduce a dense point-inception block, which derives from a combination of an inception-style block and a dense block, to improve feature propagation. In addition, we devise a multiscale loss to guide the autoencoder in focusing attention on the coarse-grained points with better coverage of the entire point cloud, which makes it easier for the autoencoder to obtain better optimization of the qualities of all points. Experimental results show that our proposed framework still has a performance gap compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms in the MPEG G-PCC reference software TMC13. However, it does outperform the RAHT-RLGR, which is one of the core transforms used in TMC13 without many well-designed techniques that make TMC13 what it is today. It outperforms RAHT-RLGR by 2.63 dB, 1.77 dB, and 3.40 dB on average in terms of the BD-PSNR for the Y, U, and V components. A subjective quality comparison demonstrates that our framework can preserve more textures and reduce blocking and color noise artifacts.
Sheng et al. (Fri,) studied this question.