Motion-Compensated Compression of Dynamic Voxelized Point Clouds

Dynamic point clouds are a potential new frontier in visual communication systems. A few articles have addressed the compression of point clouds, but very few references exist on exploring temporal redundancies. This paper presents a novel motion-compensated approach to encoding dynamic voxelized point clouds at low bit rates. A simple coder breaks the voxelized point cloud at each frame into blocks of voxels. Each block is either encoded in intra-frame mode or is replaced by a motion-compensated version of a block in the previous frame. The decision is optimized in a rate-distortion sense. In this way, both the geometry and the color are encoded with distortion, allowing for reduced bit-rates. In-loop filtering is employed to minimize compression artifacts caused by distortion in the geometry information. Simulations reveal that this simple motion-compensated coder can efficiently extend the compression range of dynamic voxelized point clouds to rates below what intra-frame coding alone can accommodate, trading rate for geometry accuracy.