Deep Learning-Based Point Cloud Compression: An In-Depth Survey and Benchmark

With the maturity of 3D capture technology, the explosive growth of point cloud data has burdened the storage and transmission process. Traditional hybrid point cloud compression (PCC) tools relying on handcrafted priors have limited compression performance and are increasingly weak in addressing the burden induced by data growth. Recently, deep learning-based PCC methods have been introduced to continue to push the PCC performance boundary. With the thriving of deep PCC, the community urgently demands a systematic overview to conclude the past progress and present future research directions. In this paper, we have a detailed review that covers popular point cloud datasets, algorithm evolution, benchmarking analysis, and future trends. Concretely, we first introduce several widely-used PCC datasets according to their major properties. Then the algorithm evolution of existing studies on deep PCC, including lossy ones and lossless ones proposed for various point cloud types, is reviewed. Apart from academic studies, we also investigate the development of relevant international standards (i.e., MPEG standards and JPEG standards). To help have an in-depth understanding of the advance of deep PCC, we select a representative set of methods and conduct extensive experiments on multiple datasets. Comprehensive benchmarking comparisons and analysis reveal the pros and cons of previous methods. Finally, based on the profound analysis, we highlight the challenges and future trends of deep learning-based PCC, paving the way for further study.