Block-Based Inter-Frame Prediction For Dynamic Point Cloud Compression

In recent years, 3D point clouds have gained popularity thanks to technological advances such as the increased computational power and the availability of low-cost devices for acquisition of 3D information, like RGBD sensors. However, raw point clouds demand a large amount of data for their representation, and compression is mandatory to allow efficient transmission and storage. Inter-frame prediction is a widely used approach to achieve high compression rates in 2D video encoders, but the current literature still lacks solutions that efficiently exploit temporal redundancy for point cloud encoding. In this work, we propose a novel inter-frame prediction for 3D point cloud compression, which explores temporal redundancies in the 3D space. Moreover, a mode decision algorithm is also proposed to dynamically choose the best encoding mode between inter and intra prediction. The proposed method yields a bitrate reduction of 15.6% and 3.5% for geometry and luma information respectively, with no significant impact in objective quality when compared to the MPEG 3DG solution, called G-PCC.