SPAC: Sampling-based Progressive Attribute Compression for Dense Point Clouds

We propose an end-to-end attribute compression method for dense point clouds. The proposed method combines a frequency sampling module, an adaptive scale feature extraction module with geometry assistance, and a global hyperprior entropy model. The frequency sampling module uses a Hamming window and the Fast Fourier Transform to extract high-frequency components of the point cloud. The difference between the original point cloud and the sampled point cloud is divided into multiple sub-point clouds. These sub-point clouds are then partitioned using an octree, providing a structured input for feature extraction. The feature extraction module integrates adaptive convolutional layers and uses offset-attention to capture both local and global features. Then, a geometry-assisted attribute feature refinement module is used to refine the extracted attribute features. Finally, a global hyperprior model is introduced for entropy encoding. This model propagates hyperprior parameters from the deepest (base) layer to the other layers, further enhancing the encoding efficiency. At the decoder, a mirrored network is used to progressively restore features and reconstruct the color attribute through transposed convolutional layers. The proposed method encodes base layer information at a low bitrate and progressively adds enhancement layer information to improve reconstruction accuracy. Compared to the latest G-PCC test model (TMC13v23) under the MPEG common test conditions (CTCs), the proposed method achieved an average Bjontegaard delta bitrate reduction of 24.58% for the Y component (21.23% for YUV combined) on the MPEG Category Solid dataset and 22.48% for the Y component (17.19% for YUV combined) on the MPEG Category Dense dataset. This is the first instance of a learning-based codec outperforming the G-PCC standard on these datasets under the MPEG CTCs.

Feature Compression for Cloud-Edge Multimodal 3D Object Detection

Machine vision systems, which can efficiently manage extensive visual perception tasks, are becoming increasingly popular in industrial production and daily life. Due to the challenge of simultaneously obtaining accurate depth and texture information with a single sensor, multimodal data captured by cameras and LiDAR is commonly used to enhance performance. Additionally, cloud-edge cooperation has emerged as a novel computing approach to improve user experience and ensure data security in machine vision systems. This paper proposes a pioneering solution to address the feature compression problem in multimodal 3D object detection. Given a sparse tensor-based object detection network at the edge device, we introduce two modes to accommodate different application requirements: Transmission-Friendly Feature Compression (T-FFC) and Accuracy-Friendly Feature Compression (A-FFC). In T-FFC mode, only the output of the last layer of the network's backbone is transmitted from the edge device. The received feature is processed at the cloud device through a channel expansion module and two spatial upsampling modules to generate multi-scale features. In A-FFC mode, we expand upon the T-FFC mode by transmitting two additional types of features. These added features enable the cloud device to generate more accurate multi-scale features. Experimental results on the KITTI dataset using the VirConv-L detection network showed that T-FFC was able to compress the features by a factor of 6061 with less than a 3% reduction in detection performance. On the other hand, A-FFC compressed the features by a factor of about 901 with almost no degradation in detection performance. We also designed optional residual extraction and 3D object reconstruction modules to facilitate the reconstruction of detected objects. The reconstructed objects effectively reflected details of the original objects.

3DAttGAN: A 3D Attention-based Generative Adversarial Network for Joint Space-Time Video Super-Resolution

In many applications, including surveillance, entertainment, and restoration, there is a need to increase both the spatial resolution and the frame rate of a video sequence. The aim is to improve visual quality, refine details, and create a more realistic viewing experience. Existing space-time video super-resolution methods do not effectively use spatio-temporal information. To address this limitation, we propose a generative adversarial network for joint space-time video super-resolution. The generative network consists of three operations: shallow feature extraction, deep feature extraction, and reconstruction. It uses three-dimensional (3D) convolutions to process temporal and spatial information simultaneously and includes a novel 3D attention mechanism to extract the most important channel and spatial information. The discriminative network uses a two-branch structure to handle details and motion information, making the generated results more accurate. Experimental results on the Vid4, Vimeo-90K, and REDS datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/FCongRui/3DAttGan.git.

Enhancing context models for point cloud geometry compression with context feature residuals and multi-loss

In point cloud geometry compression, context models usually use the one-hot encoding of node occupancy as the label, and the cross-entropy between the one-hot encoding and the probability distribution predicted by the context model as the loss function. However, this approach has two main weaknesses. First, the differences between contexts of different nodes are not significant, making it difficult for the context model to accurately predict the probability distribution of node occupancy. Second, as the one-hot encoding is not the actual probability distribution of node occupancy, the cross-entropy loss function is inaccurate. To address these problems, we propose a general structure that can enhance existing context models. We introduce the context feature residuals into the context model to amplify the differences between contexts. We also add a multi-layer perception branch, that uses the mean squared error between its output and node occupancy as a loss function to provide accurate gradients in backpropagation. We validate our method by showing that it can improve the performance of an octree-based model (OctAttention) and a voxel-based model (VoxelDNN) on the object point cloud datasets MPEG 8i and MVUB, as well as the LiDAR point cloud dataset SemanticKITTI.

Enhancing octree-based context models for point cloud geometry compression with attention-based child node number prediction

In point cloud geometry compression, most octreebased context models use the cross-entropy between the onehot encoding of node occupancy and the probability distribution predicted by the context model as the loss. This approach converts the problem of predicting the number (a regression problem) and the position (a classification problem) of occupied child nodes into a 255-dimensional classification problem. As a result, it fails to accurately measure the difference between the one-hot encoding and the predicted probability distribution. We first analyze why the cross-entropy loss function fails to accurately measure the difference between the one-hot encoding and the predicted probability distribution. Then, we propose an attention-based child node number prediction (ACNP) module to enhance the context models. The proposed module can predict the number of occupied child nodes and map it into an 8- dimensional vector to assist the context model in predicting the probability distribution of the occupancy of the current node for efficient entropy coding. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed module enhances the coding efficiency of octree-based context models.

Global Spatial-Temporal Information-based Residual ConvLSTM for Video Space-Time Super-Resolution

By converting low-frame-rate, low-resolution videos into high-frame-rate, high-resolution ones, space-time video super-resolution techniques can enhance visual experiences and facilitate more efficient information dissemination. We propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) for space-time video super-resolution, namely GIRNet. To generate highly accurate features and thus improve performance, the proposed network integrates a feature-level temporal interpolation module with deformable convolutions and a global spatial-temporal information-based residual convolutional long short-term memory (convLSTM) module. In the feature-level temporal interpolation module, we leverage deformable convolution, which adapts to deformations and scale variations of objects across different scene locations. This presents a more efficient solution than conventional convolution for extracting features from moving objects. Our network effectively uses forward and backward feature information to determine inter-frame offsets, leading to the direct generation of interpolated frame features. In the global spatial-temporal information-based residual convLSTM module, the first convLSTM is used to derive global spatial-temporal information from the input features, and the second convLSTM uses the previously computed global spatial-temporal information feature as its initial cell state. This second convLSTM adopts residual connections to preserve spatial information, thereby enhancing the output features. Experiments on the Vimeo90K dataset show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in peak signal-to-noise-ratio (by 1.45 dB, 1.14 dB, and 0.02 dB over STARnet, TMNet, and 3DAttGAN, respectively), structural similarity index(by 0.027, 0.023, and 0.006 over STARnet, TMNet, and 3DAttGAN, respectively), and visually.

PCAC-GAN:ASparse-Tensor-Based Generative Adversarial Network for 3D Point Cloud Attribute Compression

Learning-based methods have proven successful in compressing geometric information for point clouds. For attribute compression, however, they still lag behind non-learning-based methods such as the MPEG G-PCC standard. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel deep learning-based point cloud attribute compression method that uses a generative adversarial network (GAN) with sparse convolution layers. Our method also includes a module that adaptively selects the resolution of the voxels used to voxelize the input point cloud. Sparse vectors are used to represent the voxelized point cloud, and sparse convolutions process the sparse tensors, ensuring computational efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of GANs to compress point cloud attributes. Our experimental results show that our method outperforms existing learning-based techniques and rivals the latest G-PCC test model (TMC13v23) in terms of visual quality.

Relaxed forced choice improves performance of visual quality assessment methods

In image quality assessment, a collective visual quality score for an image or video is obtained from the individual ratings of many subjects. One commonly used format for these experiments is the two-alternative forced choice method. Two stimuli with the same content but differing visual quality are presented sequentially or side-by-side. Subjects are asked to select the one of better quality, and when uncertain, they are required to guess. The relaxed alternative forced choice format aims to reduce the cognitive load and the noise in the responses due to the guessing by providing a third response option, namely, ``not sure''. This work presents a large and comprehensive crowdsourcing experiment to compare these two response formats: the one with the ``not sure'' option and the one without it. To provide unambiguous ground truth for quality evaluation, subjects were shown pairs of images with differing numbers of dots and asked each time to choose the one with more dots. Our crowdsourcing study involved 254 participants and was conducted using a within-subject design. Each participant was asked to respond to 40 pair comparisons with and without the ``not sure'' response option and completed a questionnaire to evaluate their cognitive load for each testing condition. The experimental results show that the inclusion of the ``not sure'' response option in the forced choice method reduced mental load and led to models with better data fit and correspondence to ground truth. We also tested for the equivalence of the models and found that they were different. The dataset is available at http://database.mmsp-kn.de/cogvqa-database.html.

GQE-Net: A Graph-based Quality Enhancement Network for Point Cloud Color Attribute

In recent years, point clouds have become increasingly popular for representing three-dimensional (3D) visual objects and scenes. To efficiently store and transmit point clouds, compression methods have been developed, but they often result in a degradation of quality. To reduce color distortion in point clouds, we propose a graph-based quality enhancement network (GQE-Net) that uses geometry information as an auxiliary input and graph convolution blocks to extract local features efficiently. Specifically, we use a parallel-serial graph attention module with a multi-head graph attention mechanism to focus on important points or features and help them fuse together. Additionally, we design a feature refinement module that takes into account the normals and geometry distance between points. To work within the limitations of GPU memory capacity, the distorted point cloud is divided into overlap-allowed 3D patches, which are sent to GQE-Net for quality enhancement. To account for differences in data distribution among different color omponents, three models are trained for the three color components. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. For example, when implementing GQE-Net on the recent G-PCC coding standard test model, 0.43 dB, 0.25 dB, and 0.36 dB Bjontegaard delta (BD)-peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), corresponding to 14.0%, 9.3%, and 14.5% BD-rate savings can be achieved on dense point clouds for the Y, Cb, and Cr components, respectively.

Progressive Knowledge Transfer Based on Human Visual Perception Mechanism for Perceptual Quality Assessment of Point Clouds

With the wide applications of colored point cloud in many fields, point cloud perceptual quality assessment plays a vital role in the visual communication systems owing to the existence of quality degradations introduced in various stages. However, the existing point cloud quality assessments ignore the mechanism of human visual system (HVS) which has an important impact on the accuracy of the perceptual quality assessment. In this paper, a progressive knowledge transfer based on human visual perception mechanism for perceptual quality assessment of point clouds (PKT-PCQA) is proposed. The PKT-PCQA merges local features from neighboring regions and global features extracted from graph spectrum. Taking into account the HVS properties, the spatial and channel attention mechanism is also considered in PKT-PCQA. Besides, inspired by the hierarchical perception system of human brains, PKT-PCQA adopts a progressive knowledge transfer to convert the coarse-grained quality classification knowledge to the fine-grained quality prediction task. Experiments on three large and independent point cloud assessment datasets show that the proposed no reference PKT-PCQA network achieves better of equivalent performance comparing with the state-of-the-art full reference quality assessment methods, outperforming the existed no reference quality assessment network.