Distortion metric for robust 3D point cloud transmission

This paper discusses using a forward error correction (FEC) algorithm to protect the transmission of progressively compressed 3D point clouds against packets loss. We design a metric to evaluate each layer's quality contribution to the decoding result of the progressively compressed model. With this metric, we minimize the expected distortion when applying an Unequal Error Protection (UEP) strategy to allocate channel bits to different layers of the model. The performance of employing UEP and Equal Error Protection (EEP) are compared with respect to the expected distortion. Experimental results show that by incorporating our distortion estimation metric with UEP, the rendering quality of a reconstructed 3D model degrades more gracefully as the packet-loss rate increases.