Point cloud compression is essential to experience volumetric multimedia as it drastically reduces the required streaming data rates. Point attributes, specifically colors, extend the challenge of lossy compression beyond geometric representation to achieving joint reconstruction of texture and geometry. State-of-the-art methods separate geometry and attributes to compress them individually. This comes at a computational cost, requiring an encoder and a decoder for each modality. Additionally, as attribute compression methods require the same geometry for encoding and decoding, the encoder emulates the decoder-side geometry reconstruction as an input step to project and compress the attributes. In this work, we propose to learn joint compression of geometry and attributes using a single, adaptive autoencoder model, embedding both modalities into a unified latent space which is then entropy encoded. Key to the technique is to replace the search for trade-offs between rate, attribute quality and geometry quality, through conditioning the model on the desired qualities of both modalities, bypassing the need for training model ensembles. To differentiate important point cloud regions during encoding or to allow view-dependent compression for user-centered streaming, conditioning is pointwise, which allows for local quality and rate variation. Our evaluation shows comparable performance to state-of-the-art compression methods for geometry and attributes, while reducing complexity compared to related compression methods.

本研究解决了点云压缩中几何与属性联合重建的挑战。作者提出了一种基于自适应自动编码器的联合压缩方法，将几何和属性嵌入统一的潜在空间，从而简化了计算复杂度。实验结果表明，该方法在性能上与先进的压缩方法可比，同时显著降低了复杂性。

通过多模态速率控制在单一模型中学习点云几何和属性的压缩