Point Cloud Compression with Sibling Context and Surface Priors

Abstract

We present a novel octree-based multi-level framework for large-scale point cloud compression, which can organize sparse and unstructured point clouds in a memory-efficient way. In this framework, we propose a new entropy model that explores the hierarchical dependency in an octree using the context of siblings’ children, ancestors, and neighbors to encode the occupancy information of each non-leaf octree node into a bitstream. Moreover, we locally fit quadratic surfaces with a voxel-based geometry-aware module to provide geometric priors in entropy encoding. These strong priors empower our entropy framework to encode the octree into a more compact bitstream. In the decoding stage, we apply a two-step heuristic strategy to restore point clouds with better reconstruction quality. The quantitative evaluation shows that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with a bitrate improvement of 11-16% and 12-14% on the KITTI Odometry and nuScenes datasets, respectively.