Successive Refinement of Bounding Volumes for Point Cloud Coding

The paper proposes a new lossy way of encoding the geometry of point clouds. The proposed scheme reconstructs the geometry from only the two depth maps associated to a single projection direction and then proposes a progressive reconstruction process using suitably defined anchor points. The reconstruction from the two depth images follows several primitives for analyzing and encoding, several of which are only optional. The resulting bitstream is embedded and can be truncated at various levels of reconstruction of the bounding volume. The encoding tools for encoding the needed entities are extremely simple and can be combined flexibly. The scheme can also be combined with the G-PCC coding, for reconstructing in a lossless way the sparse point clouds. The experiments show improvement of the rate-distortion performance of the proposed method when combined with the G-PCC codec as compared to G-PCC codec alone.