Parallel point cloud compression using truncated octree

Abstract

Existing methods of unstructured point cloud compression usually exploit the spatial sparseness of point clouds using hierarchical tree data structures for spatial encoding. However, such methods can be inefficient when very deep octrees are applied to sparse point cloud data to maintain low level of geometric error during compression. This paper proposes a novel octree structure called truncated octree that improves the compression ratio by representing the deep octree with a set of shallow sub-octrees which can save storage without losing the original structure. We also propose a variable length addressing scheme, to adaptively choose the length of an octree’s node address based on the truncation level—shorter (resp. longer) address when octree is truncated near the leaf (resp. root) which leads to further compression. The method is able to achieve 40% to 90% compression ratio on our tested models for point clouds of different spatial distributions. For extremely sparse point clouds, the method achieves approximately 7 times higher compression ratio than previous methods. Moreover, the method is designed to run in parallel for octree construction, encoding and decoding.