Entropy‐driven Progressive Compression of 3D Point Clouds

Abstract 3D point clouds stand as one of the prevalent representations for 3D data, offering the advantage of closely aligning with sensing technologies and providing an unbiased representation of a measured physical scene. Progressive compression is required for real‐world applications operating on networked infrastructures with restricted or variable bandwidth. We contribute a novel approach that leverages a recursive binary space partition, where the partitioning planes are not necessarily axis‐aligned and optimized via an entropy criterion. The planes are encoded via a novel adaptive quantization method combined with prediction. The input 3D point cloud is encoded as an interlaced stream of partitioning planes and number of points in the cells of the partition. Compared to previous work, the added value is an improved rate‐distortion performance, especially for very low bitrates. The latter are critical for interactive navigation of large 3D point clouds on heterogeneous networked infrastructures.