Point Cloud Compression via Constrained Optimal Transport

This paper presents a novel point cloud compression method COT-PCC by formulating the task as a constrained optimal transport (COT) problem. COT-PCC takes the bitrate of compressed features as an extra constraint of optimal transport (OT) which learns the distribution transformation between original and reconstructed points. Specifically, the formulated COT is implemented with a generative adversarial network (GAN) and a bitrate loss for training. The discriminator measures the Wasserstein distance between input and reconstructed points, and a generator calculates the optimal mapping between distributions of input and reconstructed point cloud. Moreover, we introduce a learnable sampling module for downsampling in the compression procedure. Extensive results on both sparse and dense point cloud datasets demonstrate that COT-PCC outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both CD and PSNR metrics. Source codes are available at https://github.com/cognaclee/PCC-COT.