Motion-Compensated Predictive RAHT for Dynamic Point Clouds

We study the use of predictive approaches alongside the region-adaptive hierarchical transform (RAHT) in attribute compression of dynamic point clouds. The use of intra-frame prediction with RAHT was shown to improve attribute compression performance over pure RAHT and represents the state-of-the-art in attribute compression of point clouds, being part of MPEG's geometry-based test model. We studied a combination of inter-frame and intra-frame prediction for RAHT for the compression of dynamic point clouds. An adaptive zero-motion-vector (ZMV) scheme and an adaptive motion-compensated scheme are developed. The simple adaptive ZMV approach is able to achieve sizable gains over pure RAHT and over the intra-frame predictive RAHT (I-RAHT) for point clouds with little or no motion while ensuring similar compression performance to I-RAHT for point clouds with intense motion. The motion-compensated approach, more complex and more powerful, is able to achieve large gains across all of the tested dynamic point clouds.