Colored Point Cloud-based Mesh Registration for Enhancing Inter-frame Coding of Texture Video in V-DMC

The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is developing a new standard, i.e., Video-based Dynamic Mesh Coding (V-DMC), for dynamic meshes with time-varying topology. The time-varying topology and attributes challenge the V-DMC encoder in exploiting temporal correlations for redundancy minimization. Currently, the inter-frame coding in V-DMC is constrained to tracked sequences having consistent topology, with non-tracked ones predominantly using intra-coding. Texture images, as the dominant bit rate component, are inadequately compressed in Random Access (RA) mode. The precision of the mesh registration algorithm directly influences the intra-frame blocks’ proportion during the inter-frame coding of texture images, thereby affecting its coding efficiency. This paper proposed a colored point cloud-based mesh registration technique to bolster the intra-frame coding efficiency for non-tracked sequences. This method transforms the mesh into a colored point cloud and employs an inter-frame search algorithm for enhanced motion search efficiency. Local deformation near the matching point is then ascertained through directional searches at individual points. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves a geometric gain of 4.1% and a texture gain of 6.47% for non-tracked sequences.