We propose a complete system to enable progressive coding with quality scalability of the mesh geometry, in MPEGâ\euro™s state-of-the-art Video-based Dynamic Mesh Coding (V-DMC) framework. In particular, we propose an alternative method for encoding the subdivision wavelet coefficients in V-DMC, using a mesh-based zerotree coding approach. The proposed method works directly in the native 3D mesh space. It allows us to identify parent-child relationships amongst the wavelet coefficients across different subdivision levels, which can be used to achieve an efficient and versatile coding mechanism. We demonstrate that, given a starting base mesh, a target subdivision surface and a desired maximum number of zerotree passes, our system produces an elegant and visually attractive lossy-to-lossless mesh geometry reconstruction with no further user intervention. Moreover, lossless coefficient encoding with our approach is shown to require almost the same bitrate as the default displacement coding methods in V-DMC. Yet, our approach provides several levels of quality resolution within each target bitrate, while the current solutions encode a single quality level only. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a zerotree-based method has been proposed and demonstrated to work for the compression of dynamic time-varying meshes, and the first time that an embedded quality-scalable approach has been used in the V-DMC framework.

Arithmetic coding is used in most media compression methods. Context modeling is usually done through frequency counting and look-up tables (LUTs). For long-memory signals, probability modeling with large context sizes is often infeasible. Recently, neural networks have been used to model probabilities of large contexts in order to drive arithmetic coders. These neural networks have been trained offline. We introduce an online method for training a perceptron-based context-adaptive arithmetic coder on-the-fly, called adaptive perceptron coding, which continuously learns the context probabilities and quickly converges to the signal statistics.We test adaptive perceptron coding over a binary image database, with results always exceeding the performance of LUT-based methods for large context sizes and of recurrent neural networks. We also compare the method to a version requiring offline training, which leads to equally satisfactory results.

We propose an embedded attribute encoding method for point clouds based on set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) [1]. The encoder is used with the region-adaptive hierarchical transform [2] which has been a popular transform for point cloud coding, even included in the standard geometry-based point cloud coder (G-PCC) [3],[4]. The result is an encoder that is efficient, scalable, and embedded. That is, higher compression is achieved by trimming the full bit-stream. G-PCC’s RAHT coefficient prediction prevents the straightforward incorporation of SPIHT into G-PCC. However, our results over other RAHT based coders are promising, improving over the original, nonpredictive RAHT encoder, while providing the key functionality of being embedded.

We present a method to super-resolve voxelized point clouds down-sampled by a fractional factor, using look-up-tables (LUT) constructed from self-similarities from its own down-sampled neighborhoods. Given a down-sampled point cloud geometry Vd, and its corresponding fractional down-sampling factor s, the proposed method determines the set of positions that may have generated Vd, and estimates which of these positions were indeed occupied (super-resolution). Assuming that the geometry of a point cloud is approximately self-similar at different scales, LUTs relating down-sampled neighborhood configurations with children occupancy configurations can be estimated by further down-sampling the input point cloud to Vd2 , and by taking into account the irregular children distribution derived from fractional down-sampling. For completeness, we also interpolate texture by averaging colors from adjacent neighbors. We present extensive test results over different point clouds, showing the effectiveness of the proposed method against baseline methods.

Geometry-based point cloud compression (G-PCC) has been rapidly evolving in the context of international standards. Despite the inherent scalability of octree-based geometry description, current G-PCC attribute compression techniques prevent full scalability for compressed point clouds. In this paper, we present a solution to add scalability to attributes compressed using the region-adaptive hierarchical transform (RAHT), enabling the reconstruction of the point cloud using only a portion of the original bitstream. Without the full geometry information, one cannot compute the weights in which the RAHT relies on to calculate its coefficients for further levels of detail. In order to overcome this problem, we propose a linear relationship approximation relating the downsampled point cloud to the truncated inverse RAHT coefficients at that same level. The linear relationship parameters are sent as side information. After truncating the bitstream at a point corresponding to a given octree level, we can, then, recreate the attributes at that level. Tests were carried out and results attest the good approximation quality of the proposed technique.