Motion-compensated compression of point cloud video

3D immersive communications are trending as real-time point clouds capture and display of point cloud video become feasible. This paper presents a novel motion-compensated approach to encoding dynamic voxelized point clouds (VPC) at low bit rates. A simple coder breaks the VPC into blocks which are intra-frame coded or replaced by a motion-compensated version of a block in the previous frame. The decision is optimized in a rate-distortion sense, encoding with distortion both geometry and the color, at 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.