Lightweight Joint Coding-Modulation Optical Fiber Communication System for Point Cloud

Achieving efficient point cloud (PC) transmission is a fundamental requirement for immersive holographic-type communication. However, traditional optical fiber communication (TOFC), based on separated coding modulation for PC transmission, faces challenges related to massive data transmission and heavy computational resource requirements. To achieve lightweight and efficient PC transmission, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a joint coding-modulation optical fiber communication system for PC transmission (JCMPC). A joint encoding-modulation (JEM) network based on 3D convolution is designed to encode the PC into symbols for transmission directly. At the receiver, a joint decoding-demodulation (JDD) network is used to reconstruct the signals transmitted through the communication channel into the received PC. The experimental results indicate that the proposed JCMPC outperforms transmission schemes based on separate coding modulation and exhibits gradual performance degradation with the deterioration of channel conditions. We evaluate the decoding computational complexity of our proposed JCMPC scheme against the separate transmission schemes using Geometry-based Point Cloud Compression (G-PCC) and Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes. The results demonstrate that JCMPC reduces the decoding computational operations by over 80% compared to G-PCC+LDPC.