Differential Transform for Video-Based Plenoptic Point Cloud Coding

Point cloud compression has been studied in standard bodies and we are here concerned with the Moving Picture Experts Group video-based point cloud compression (V-PCC) solution. Plenoptic point clouds (PPC) is a novel volumetric data representation wherein points are associated with colors in all viewing directions to improve realism. It is sampled as a number (N-c) of attribute colors per point. We propose a new method for the efficient video-based compression of PPC that is backwards compatible with the existing single-color V-PCC decoder. V-PCC generates three image atlases which are encoded using an image/video encoder. We assume there may be a reference color which is to be encoded as the main payload. We generate N-c + 3 atlases and we produce N-c differential images against the reference color image. Those difference images are pixel-wise transformed using an N-c-point discrete cosine transform, generating N-c transformed atlases which are encoded, forming the secondary payload. Such secondary information is the plenoptic enhancement to the point cloud. If there is no reference attribute, we skip the differences and use the lowest frequency of the transformed atlases as the main payload. Results are presented that show an unrivaled performance of the proposed method.