ViewPCGC: View-Guided Learned Point Cloud Geometry Compression

With the rise of immersive media applications such as digital museums, virtual reality, and interactive exhibitions, point clouds, as a three-dimensional data storage format, have gained increasingly widespread attention. The massive data volume of point clouds imposes extremely high requirements on transmission bandwidth in the above applications, gradually becoming a bottleneck for immersive media applications. Although existing learning-based point cloud compression methods have achieved specific successes in compression efficiency by mining the spatial redundancy of their local structural features, these methods often overlook the intrinsic connections between point cloud data and other modality data (such as image modality), thereby limiting further improvements in compression efficiency. To address the limitation, we innovatively propose a view-guided learned point cloud geometry compression scheme, namely ViewPCGC. We adopt a novel self-attention mechanism and cross-modality attention mechanism based on sparse convolution to align the modality features of the point cloud and the view image, removing view redundancy through Modality Redundancy Removal Module (MRRM). Simultaneously, side information of the view image is introduced into the Conditional Checkboard Entropy Model (CCEM), significantly enhancing the accuracy of the probability density function estimation for point cloud geometry. In addition, we design a View-Guided Quality Enhancement Module (VG-QEM) in the decoder, utilizing the contour information of the point cloud in the view image to supplement reconstruction details. The superior experimental performance demonstrates the effectiveness of our method. Compared to the state-of-the-art point cloud geometry compression methods, ViewPCGC exhibits an average performance gain exceeding 10% on D1-PSNR metric.