Lossless point cloud geometry compression via binary tree partition and intra prediction

Characterized by geometry and photometry attributes, point cloud has become widely applied in the real-time presentation of various 3D objects and scenes. The development of even more precise capture devices and the increasing requirements for vivid rendering inevitably induce huge point capacity, thus making the point cloud compression a demanding issue. Considering the non-uniform sampling and time-variant geometry, appropriate structural representation for point cloud is important. In this paper, we propose a lossless geometry compression algorithm for 3D point cloud which serves as the basis of future adaptive improvement. We utilize the binary tree structure for effectively partitioning unorganized points into block structure. This hierarchical representation obtains roughly the same quantity level for each leaf node. Further analysis is conducted on an intra-geometry prediction via extended Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), achieving an impressive performance in eliminating point-wise redundancy while preserving one single reference position for each block. The residual encoding is accomplished via a shallow neural network-based lossless compression algorithm, PAQ. Simulation results confirm the lossless compression of geometry from high quality capture, achieving approximately 3.5 times efficiency gain over the state of art algorithm implemented as MPEG Point Cloud Compression (PCC) reference software.