A Framework For Surface Light Field Compression

Surface Light Fields (SLF) have previously been proposed for representing 3D scenes under complex lighting conditions, enabling immersive viewing experiences from arbitrary observation directions. In this work, we present a new approach for SLF representation and a framework for SLF compression. Specifically, the SLF is compactly represented in a B-Spline wavelet basis. This representation is capable of modeling diverse surface materials and complex lighting conditions. The coefficients of the B-Spline wavelet are then compressed by removing the spatial redundancy over surface points. Compared with image based light field compression, the proposed scheme is functionally advanced because it enables rendering objects from arbitrary viewpoints with both good quality and high efficiency. In terms of bitrate and distortion, experimental results have shown that the proposed method can achieve competitive performance but with much lower decoder computational complexity, indicating its potential in practical virtual and augmented reality applications.