Efficient 2D Video Coding of Volumetric Video Data

Point clouds for immersive media technology have received substantial interest in the recent years. Such representation of 3D scenery provides freedom of movement for the viewer. But transmitting or storing such content requires large amount of data and it is not feasible on today's network technology. Thus, there is a necessity for having efficient compression algorithms. Recently, projection-based methods have been considered for compressing point cloud data. In these methods, the point cloud data are projected onto a 2D image plane in order to utilize the current 2D video coding standards for compressing such content. Such coding schemes provide significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods in terms of coding efficiency. However, the projection-based point cloud compression requires special handling of boundaries and sparsity in the 2D projections. This paper addresses these issues by proposing two methods which improve the compression performance of both intra-frame and inter-frame coding for 2D video coding of volumetric data. The conducted experiments illustrated that the bitrate requirements are reduced by around 26% and 29% for geometry and color attributes, respectively compared to the case that the proposed algorithms are not applied.