Rate-Reconfigurable Deep Point Cloud Compression with Perceptual Bit Allocation Optimization

Conventional end-to-end learning-based point cloud compression requires training multiple models to adapt to different target bit rates. Moreover, the rate difference between geometry and attribute components of point clouds is not well-considered. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Rate-Reconfigurable Deep Point Cloud Compression (RR-DPCC) with on/off-line Perceptual Bit Allocation Optimization (PBAO-ON/OFF), which achieves arbitrary bit rate control with one trained deep model and high efficiency joint geometry and attribute coding. First, we propose the framework of the RR-DPCC using PBAO-ON/OFF, which includes Point Cloud Quality Assessment (PCQA) for perceptual quality measurement, PBAO-ON/OFF modules for bit allocation and RR-DPCC for high efficiency point cloud coding. Second, we propose a one-stream network of the RR-DPCC to encode the attribute and geometry of point clouds jointly. Moreover, in RR-DPCC, a bitrate reconfigurable module is proposed to encode multiple fine-grained bitrate points with one trained model and a rate allocation module is proposed to allocate bits between geometry and attribute. Third, we propose on/off-line PBAO algorithms to maximize the perceptual quality of the reconstructed point cloud, where the bits are properly allocated based on the importance of geometry and attribute. Meanwhile, rate-distortion models (R-α/β and D-α/β) are derived for high accuracy rate control and bit allocation. Experimental results show that the proposed RR-DPCC achieves fine-grained bitrate control and allocation through a single trained model. When combined the proposed RR-DPCC with PBAO-ON, it reduces -6.56% and -18.68% bit rate on average as comparing with the state-of-the-art V-PCC and Deep Joint Geometry and Attribute Compression (Deep-JGAC), respectively. When combined with the PBAO-OFF, it achieves -4.90% and -15.34% bit rate reductions on average, and reduces 98.38%/22.05% and 53.75%/10.04% encoding/decoding time on average with respect to V-PCC and Deep-JGAC.