3D Point Cloud Geometry Compression on Deep Learning

3D point cloud presentation has been widely used in computer vision, automatic driving, augmented reality, smart cities and virtual reality. 3D point cloud compression method with higher compression ratio and tiny loss is the key to improve data transportation efficiency. In this paper, we propose a new 3D point cloud geometry compression method based on deep learning, also an auto-encoder performing better than other networks in detail reconstruction. It can reach much higher compression ratio than the state-of-art while keeping tolerable loss. It also supports parallel compressing multiple models by GPU, which can improve processing efficiency greatly. The compression process is composed of two parts. Firstly, Raw data is compressed into codeword by extracting feature of raw model with encoder. Then, the codeword is further compressed with sparse coding. Decompression process is implemented in reverse order. Codeword is recovered and fed into decoder to reconstruct point cloud. Detail reconstruction ability is improved by a hierarchical structure in our decoder. Latter outputs are grown from former fuzzier outputs. In this way, details are added to former output by latter layers step by step to make a more precise prediction. We compare our method with PCL compression and Draco compression on ShapeNet40 part dataset. Our method may be the first deep learning-based point cloud compression algorithm. The experiments demonstrate it is superior to former common compression algorithms with large compression ratio, which can also reserve original shapes with tiny loss.