2. RELATED WORK

With the fast-rising number of 3D sensing technologies, dynamic 3D video is getting more important and practical for representing 3D contents and environments. For a long time, representing the world has been done using 2D cameras where the visualization of the world's components were possible. Nowadays, there are plenty devices which they can record and represent the world in 3D mode. Representing 3D data using polygon meshes has been employed conventionally. Nevertheless, obtaining point cloud is faster and easier because of lower complexity in their structure and computations [Reference Mekuria, Blom and Cesar2]. 3D point clouds might be used widely in some environments such as virtual reality, 3D video streaming in mixed reality, and mobile mapping.

A point cloud consists of sets of points in 3D space where each point has its own spatial location along with a corresponding vector of attributes, such as colors, normals, reflectance, etc. Point cloud data produced by some high-resolution sensors, e.g. Microsoft Kinect, can be represented by high rates point clouds, e.g. a reconstructed 3D point cloud may contain several millions of points. Thus, processing and transmitting point clouds is challenging and needs a high amount of resources because of high density of generated data.

In recent years many efforts have been devoted to promote the efficiency of compression method algorithms for such 3D point cloud data. One of the first and main classes of point cloud compressors is progressive point cloud coding. In this approach, which is mostly based on kd-tree, a coarse representation of the complete point cloud is encoded and then several refinement layers are built in order to achieve efficient compression. In this context, [Reference Alliez and Desbrun7] splits a 3D space in half recursively using a kd-tree structure and points in each half are encoded. For each subdivision, empty cells are not subdivided anymore. Applying the same method and adapting it to an octree structure was proposed in [Reference Peng and Kuo8] and [Reference Huang, Peng, Kuo and Gopi9]. These approaches achieve better results because they are also considering connectivity information. The work in [Reference Schnabel and Klein10] exploits a similar work to the mentioned octree-based approaches, while introducing a novel prediction technique for surface approximation.

Besides geometry compression algorithms, there are many methods considering attribute compression. For example, the octree structure is adopted in [Reference Zhang, Florêncio and Loop11] and attributes are treated as signals. A graph in each level of octree is constructed for the leaves (connecting nearby points in a small neighborhood). Then the graph transform (Karhunen–Loeve) is employed in order to decorrelate color attributes on the graph. A hybrid color attribute compression is introduced in [Reference Cui, Xu and Jang12], where two different compressing modes, run-length coding and palette coding, are applied on each block. After comparing the distortion values with the defined thresholds, the final block with the best corresponding compression mode is selected. Wang etal. [Reference Wang, Wang, Luo and Liu13] introduced a method to compress both object data and environment data using three-dimensional discretecosine transform (3D-DCT). In their work, capturing signal properties in frequency domain, using DCT, attains more information from the original raw data.

While most of the above-mentioned (PCC) approaches are focusing on static point cloud, there are many efforts on compression of dynamic point cloud sequences. Thanou etal. [Reference Thanou, Chou and Frossard14] proposed a first work dealing with dynamic voxelized point clouds. In their work a time-varying point cloud codec is introduced, where point clouds are represented as sets of graphs. This method is using wavelet-based features to find matches between points and predicts an octree structure for adjacent frames. In [Reference Kammerl, Blodow, Rusu, Gedikli, Beetz and Steinbach1], the geometry compression is completed by considering an octree structure for each frame of point cloud sequences. Unfortunately, 3D motion estimation is one of the challenging issues in PCC, due to the lack of information in point-to-point correspondences in a sequence of frames. One of the first work concerning motion estimation coding for dynamic point clouds is introduced in [Reference de Queiroz and Chou15]. In this method, the complete point cloud is divided into occupied blocks. Then, in the coding process, it is decided if either the block should be encoded in intra, i.e. not motion compensated, mode or it is motion compensated. In a more recent paper, [Reference Mekuria, Blom and Cesar2], a progressive compression framework is introduced. The proposed method, which is mostly focusing on mixed-reality and 3D tele-immersive systems, consists of a hybrid architecture. The architecture combines two existing methods i.e. octree-based structure including motion compensation and a common video coding framework. This solution was selected as reference technology for the MPEG CfP for PCC [6]. And in [Reference Gao, Cheung, Maugey, Frossard and Liang16] the initial idea of projection-based coding of dynamic 3D points using multiview image coding was explored.

3. PROJECTION-BASED COMPRESSION OF 3D DATA

The proposed solution takes the benefits of traditional multiview + depth 2D video compression of 3D video [Reference Merkle, Smolic, Muller and Wiegand5] and provides specific extensions to improve representation and compression for volumetric video data, similar to [Reference Gao, Cheung, Maugey, Frossard and Liang16] but also taking into account attributes and a dynamic sequence of 3D data. In [5] only a single flat projection plane is considered, i.e. the camera plane. For the proposed approach a 3D video object, e.g. represented as a dynamic sequence of point clouds, is projected onto one or more simple geometries. These geometries are “unfolded” onto 2D images, with two images per object: one for texture (color attribute) and other for geometry. Two examples for such geometry projections are illustrated in Fig. 2, including the resulting 2D projection planes. Standard 2D video coding technologies are used to compress the 2D projections and relevant projection metadata is transmitted alongside the encoded video bit streams. At the receiver, a decoder decodes the video and performs an inverse 2D-to-3D projection to regenerate the 3D video object, according to the received metadata. Figure 3 depicts the overall processing chain associated with the projection-based volumetric video coding solution. Figure 4 illustrates examples of the projected texture (a) and geometry (b) images of Fig. 2(b) and respective reconstructions. The individual steps are described in more details as follows.

Fig. 2.

Examples of 3D-to-2D projection for sequence Longdress provided by 8i [Reference d'Eon, Harrison, Myers and Chou17]. (a) Example of 3D-to-2D projection onto a cylinder and (b) example of 3D-to-2D projection onto four rectangular planes for sequence.

Fig. 3.

Projection-based volumetric video coding workflow.

Fig. 4.

Projected (a) texture and (b) geometry images for (c) original point cloud (left), as well as decoded point clouds at 13 MBit/s for the proposed solution (middle) and reference technology [Reference Mekuria, Blom and Cesar2] (right).

3.0.1. 3D-to-2D projection

Before any projection is performed, the first point cloud of a volumetric video sequence is loaded and analyzed to initialize some basic projection parameters, such as its 3D bounding box, primary orientation, best feasible projection geometry, and image plane characteristics. After initialization, each point in the point cloud is projected onto the selected 2D geometry. Figure 2 depicts examples for such a projection setups and resulting 2D texture images for a projection onto a 3D geometry, e.g. a cylinder or four rectangular planes like the sides of a box. Two projection images are created, one for the color attributes (texture image) and other for the 3D depth (geometry image). There is a manifold of 3D-to-2D projection geometries and approaches, i.e. cylinders, cubes, planes, spheres, polyhedrons, etc. Different geometries may have different benefits depending on content. For the remainder of this paper, a series rectangular planes are chosen, where the planes rotate around the center of the 3D volume (bounding box). The number of planes, the orientation of the first plane, and orientation change between each plane can be given in the encoding parameters. The respective image resolutions are defined by the 3D bounding box and any possibly given up- or downsampling factor. Figure 2(b) illustrates this projection, the starting plane $P_1$ is aligned to the X-axis and there is a 90$^{\circ }$ rotation between each plane. The 2D projection of 3D point p at position $[x,y,z]$ with RGB texture attribute $[R_p,G_p,B_p]$ on texture image T and geometry image D for plane P1 are derived as follows.

(1)\begin{equation} T(x,y) = \left[ \begin{matrix} R_p \\ G_p \\ B_p \end{matrix}\right] \quad \mbox{and} \quad D(x,y) =z\tag{1}\end{equation}

In the case that more than one 3D point are mapped on the same 2D coordinates, depth buffering is applied to ensure that only the point closest to the projection plane is considered.

3.0.2. Reduction of projection artifacts before encoding

Whilst projection-based volumetric video coding can provide significant coding gains compared to the reference technology, it comes with some specific drawbacks, originating from the 3D-to-2D projection:

• • Occlusions: Not all 3D points are necessarily projected onto the 2D images. Occlusions in the projections might lead to holes in the reconstructed point clouds.

• • Invalid points: Reconstructing 3D points from decoded texture and depth images might create “invalid” 3D points due to 2D video compression artifacts.

Figure 5 depicts the effects of occluded projections (a) and invalid points (b) in a reconstructed point cloud. Both categories of artifacts can be avoided, or at least reduced, by encoder considerations.

Fig. 5.

Examples of projection-related artefacts: occlusions in the projected images lead to holes in the reconstructed point cloud (left), video coding distortion might lead to invalid points (right).

In the case of occlusions, the extension with additional projection images seems a logical approach. However, simply adding more projection images does not increase the coverage of concave areas. Thus, sequential decimation is introduced: after a given number of projections, the indices of “successfully” projected points, that is points represented on at least one projection, are collected. Then it is decided to keep these points for the following projections or remove them to provide better coverage of occluded regions. By removing these already projected points, underlying points are uncovered in the following projections. An example for removing the points after each rotation is shown in Fig. 6. After the first four rotations, all successfully projected points are removed and the rotation planes are shifted by 45$^{\circ }$ to provide a better coverage of the now uncovered remaining points, e.g. in concave regions. Figure 7 shows the resulting improved occlusion handling due to sequential decimation.

Fig. 6.

Texture (top) and geometry (bottom) images for the first frame of Longdress, covered by eight rotations of 90$^{\circ }$ with a 45$^{\circ }$ offset and sequential decimation after four rotations.

Fig. 7.

Improved occlusion handling by sequential decimation (left) versus without (right).

As seen in Fig. 6, sequential decimation can introduce a lot of small content patches, which are difficult to encode. Thus, to improve coding efficiency, the borders in the texture images can be smoothed or padded and small holes are filled by interpolation. This process is only applied to the texture image, as the geometry image is used to signal important information if a projected point is “valid” or not, i.e. should the decoder re-project this point into 3D space or not. Thus, the depth image contains high-frequency content at the patch boundaries. Quantization artifacts at these boundaries will distort the 3D reconstruction. A simple approach to dampen this effect is to introduce a depth offset $z_0$, i.e. (1) changed to $D(x,y) =z + z_0$, and reconstruct only values above this offset. Other, more comprehensive solutions are the transmission of dedicated validity information, e.g. a bit mask, or lossless encoding at patch boundaries. For this paper, only the depth offset was considered. Details on the texture smoothing process can be found in [Reference Sheikhipour, Schwarz, Vadakital and Gabbouj18].

3.0.4. 2D-to-3D re-projection

A decoder receives the bit stream, decodes the texture and geometry images plus the projection metadata, and performs a 2D-to-3D re-projection to reconstruct the decoded 3D point cloud. Analogue to (1), the reconstructed point $\hat {p}$ at position $[\hat {x},\hat {y},\hat {z}]$ and RGB texture attribute $[R_{\hat {p}},G_{\hat {p}},B_{\hat {p}}]$ is derived from the decoded texture image $\hat {T}$ and geometry image $\hat {D}$ as follows.

(2)\begin{align}\left[ \begin{matrix} R_{\hat{p}} \\ G_{\hat{p}} \\B_{\hat{p}} \end{matrix}\right] &= \hat{T}(u,v), \tag{2}\end{align}

(3)\begin{align}\hat{x}&=\frac{u}{(x_{\max}-x_{\min})}\cdot x_{\max}, \tag{3}\end{align}

(4)\begin{align} \hat{y}&=\frac{v}{(y_{\max}-y_{\min})}\cdot y_{\max}, \tag{4}\end{align}

(5)\begin{align} \hat{z}&=\frac{\hat{D}(u,v)-z_0}{(z_{\max}-z_{\min})}\cdot z_{\max}, \tag{5}\end{align}

where u and v are the horizontal and vertical pixel coordinates in the decoded images, $x_{\min / \max }$ and $y_{\min / \max }$ are the correlating ranges to translate pixel values into real-world coordinates, and $z_{\min / \max }$ is the depth quantization range.

3.0.7. Differences to the winning MPEG CfP proposal

As mentioned earlier, the presented proposal was contributed to international standardization. Although it was not selected as the winning technology, a very similar approach proposed by Apple was selected [21]. The key differences to the technology described in this paper are the creation of 2D patches and the additional signaling of occupancy information. Instead of projecting a 3D model on 3D surfaces, the model is decomposed into 2D patches based on their surface normal. Occupancy information is signaled in the form of a video-coded binary map indicating which 2D pixels shall be reprojected into 3D space. This occupancy map is replacing the concept of depth offset discussed in Section III.2 of this paper. Figure 8 illustrates the 2D texture patches and accompanying occupancy map (the geometry image is omitted from illustration to save space). The similarity to the presented approach in Fig. 6 should be clearly visible. Thus, the overall key concept of video-based encoding of 3D-to-2D projections remains the same and so do the main benefits of the presented idea: utilizing existing video coding technology to improve coding efficiency and reduce time-to-market. Since then, PCC technology has been developed under the acronym V-PCC, standing for video-based PCC, and is close to release as international standard [22,23].

Fig. 8.

Texture (left) and occupancy (right) images for the first frame of Longdress using V-PCC.

4. EVALUATION

The evaluation was performed following the specifications of the MPEG CfP for PCC.

A total of five test sequences were evaluated at five different bit rate targets. The bit rates ranged from 3 up to 55 Mbit/s, depending on the test sequence. Figure 10 provides example views rendered from reconstructed points clouds at the four lower bit rate target points for sequence Soldier, using the proposed projection-based approach. Coding distortion is assessed for geometry as well as color attributes. For geometry distortion, two different metrics are applied. The first metric calculates the mean square error (MSE) between a reconstructed point and its closest point in the original point cloud. This metric is referred to as D1, or point-to-point. The second metric calculates the MSE between a reconstructed point and a given reference surface plane. This metric is referred to as D2, or point-to-plane. Details on these two metrics are available in [Reference Tian, Ochimizu, Feng, Cohen and Vetro24]. Color distortion is calculated on a point-to-point level. The peak signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR) is obtained based on the 3D volume resolution for geometry, respectively color depth for each color channel. Bjontegaard-delta (BD) metrics are derived from the distortions achieved with the provided software [Reference Tourapis, Singer, Su and Mammou25]. For a more detailed description of the evaluation process, please see the CfP document [6].

As seen in Table 1, the proposed technology achieves significant bit rate savings over the reference technology [Reference Mekuria, Blom and Cesar2], with up to 90% for geometry and 50% for attribute compression in terms of the BD bit rate (BD-BR). However, the standard BD calculations are misleading in this context, as the actual rate-distortion (RD) curves often had very little overlap in the x-direction. In some cases, i.e. chroma channel distortions for sequences Loot and Longdress, there was no overlap at all and no BD-BR could be calculated. Therefore, an extension to the BD calculations was proposed in [Reference Tourapis, Singer, Su and Mammou25]. The results using this extension, including BD-PSNR are summarized in Table 2. Figure 11 provides the RD curves for the sequences Queen (a), RedBlack (b), Loot (c), Soldier (d), and Longdress (e).

Table 1.

Bjontegaard-delta bit rate (BD-BR) results (Random Access).

Table 2.

Adapted BD-BR results and BD-PSNR results [Reference Tourapis, Singer, Su and Mammou25].

Apart from the objective evaluation, an extensive subjective evaluation for all CfP submissions was performed by two independent labs [Reference Baroncini, Cesar, Siahaan, Reimat and Subramanyam26]. Only results for the test sequences RedAndBlack (left), Soldier (middle), and Longdress were subjectively evaluated, and only at the four lowest target rate points. An extract of their report [Reference Baroncini, Cesar, Siahaan, Reimat and Subramanyam26] is provided as the rate-quality distortion graph is shown in Fig.9. A significant improvement of the proposed technology (red line) in terms of subjective quality over the reference technology (blue line) is proven. For higher bit rates, the visual quality came even close the original, uncompressed data (green line). It should be noted that only the lower four bit rates were evaluated in the subjective quality assessment, e.g. the target bit rates shown in Fig. 10. It is possible that the proposed solution could achieve close to visual lossless compression at the highest bit rate target R05. Despite the good coding performance at higher bit rates, the proposed solution was clearly outperformed by the winning submission, especially at the lower bit rates. This is mainly due to the fact that the discrete occupancy information signaling has been proven superior to the depth offset solution when higher compression is applied, as well as the better occlusion handling using 2D patch decomposition.

Fig. 9.

Subjective MOS scores for sequences RedAndBlack (left), Soldier (middle), and Longdress (right) [Reference Baroncini, Cesar, Siahaan, Reimat and Subramanyam26], where “reference” denotes [Reference Mekuria, Blom and Cesar2] and “uncompressed” the original point cloud data.

Fig. 10.

Example views rendered from all bit streams submitted for subjective evaluation. Top to bottom: RedAndBlack, Soldier, and Longdress. Left to right: Rate R01, R02, R03, and R04.

Fig. 11.

Objective rate-distortion curves for all test sequences. (a) Objective rate-distortion curves for test sequence Queen, (b) objective rate-distortion curves for test sequence RedAndBlack, (c) objective rate-distortion curves for test sequence Loot, (d) objective rate-distortion curves for test sequence Soldier, and (e) Objective rate-distortion curves for test sequence Longdress.

A key functionality of the proposed solution is the coverage of occluded points with additional projections, as described in Section 3.0.1. Without this sequential decimation functionality, the reconstructed point clouds will show holes which result in significantly degraded subjective quality. However, this quality degradation is not well represented in the selected objective metrics, especially D2 (point-to-plane). At lower bit rates, significantly higher D2 quality scores could be achieved by ignoring these occluded parts. Table 3 summarizes the maximum achievable objective scores if sequential decimation is deactivated for the lowest two bit rates.

Table 3.

Objective quality without occlusion handling at low bit rates.

Concluding this evaluation section, it should be mentioned that the encoder and decoder run time numbers are significantly larger for the proposed solution compared to the reference software. The numbers vary depending on the target bit rates, as the reference software performs exceptionally fast on lower bit rates. But even at higher qualities, the proposed solution takes around 100 times longer to encode and 10 times longer to decode, as shown in Table 4. However, the current implementation is based on experimental reference software [19], which is known for its poor computational performance. There exist plenty of real-time hardware and software solutions for 2D video coding. For example parallelization of texture and geometry image coding (one encoder/decoder per image) could cut down processing times further. The volumetric video specific part of this approach is rather simple and requires less than 1% of the current run times. Thus, a real-time implementation of this proposal is feasible. Still, parallel processing can also be introduced to the projecting and re-projecting part: as points in a point cloud are independent, the 3D-to-2D projection can be highly parallelized, up to one process per point. The same goes for the reverse 2D-to-3D projection at the decoder, in this context to up to one process per pixel, although other configurations such as one process per column, row or block could be more feasible.

Table 4.

Average coding run times in relation to anchor.

Regarding expected memory usage, the proposed approach is relying on the underlying 2D video coding solutions and chosen coding structure. Memory efficient codecs, such as BBC's Turing codec [27], can reduce memory consumption drastically. As for the current implementation, two layers with roughly FullHD resolution are coded. For each layer a maximum of five reference frames is allowed for the random access configuration. One layer is 8 Bit with YUV420 chroma subsampling, one layer 10 Bit luma only. Thus, the total reference picture buffer size requirement per frame is roughly 32 MB. There is no need to buffer more than one input (encoder) or one output (decoder) point cloud, as temporal prediction is performed on the 2D projection planes.

\begin{align*} &\it{Texture}: 1920 \times 1080 \times 2 \times 8 Bit \times 5 \approx 20\,MB\\ &\it{Geometry}: 1920 \times 1080 \times 1 \times 10 Bit \times 5 \approx 12\,MB \end{align*}

Finally, the current implementation does not consider progressive decoding. However, such features could be easily implemented. With SHM as a code base, it is possible to select lower resolution texture and geometry planes as base layers, and one or more increasing resolutions as enhancement layers. Scalable decoding and reprojection from the selected resolution would provide progressive outputs. This functionality could also be extended for spatial random access, e.g. view-port dependent decoding.

4.0.8. Comparison to winning CfP and current stage of V-PCC standardization

As already shown in Figure 9, the winning CfP proposal [21] clearly outperformed the technology presented in this manuscript. However, in terms of complexity there was a clear benefit to the proposed solution. The surface normal calculations required for the 2D patch generation is significantly more complex than the simple geometry-projection proposal. Then again, this complexity only affects the encoder, as shown in Table 5.

Table 5.

Average coding run times in relation to anchor (all intra).

Since the CfP evaluation V-PCC has been steadily improved and is now close to finalization [23]. To illustrate this process, Figure 12 summarizes the development in terms of coding performance based on D1 geometry distortion. The proposed technology has been added as well as reference.

Fig. 12.

Progress of V-PCC coding performance since CfP evaluation.