Point Cloud-Assisted Neural Image Compression

High-efficient image compression is a critical requirement. In several scenarios where multiple modalities of data are captured by different sensors, the auxiliary information from other modalities are not fully leveraged by existing image-only codecs, leading to suboptimal compression efficiency. In this paper, we increase image compression performance with the assistance of point cloud, which is widely adopted in the area of autonomous driving. As depicted in Figure 1 (a), we have unified the digital representation of image and point cloud, and propose the point cloud-assisted neural image codec (PCA-NIC) to enhance the preservation of image texture and structure by utilizing the high-dimensional point cloud information. As depicted in Figure 1 (b), we further introduce a multi-modal feature fusion transform module (MMFFT) to capture more representative image features, remove redundant information between channels and modalities that are not relevant to the image content.