LiDAR Point Cloud Compression by Vertically Placed Objects Based on Global Motion Prediction

Abstract

A point cloud acquired through a Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) sensor can be illustrated as a continuous frame with a time axis. Since the frame-by-frame point cloud has a high correlation between frames, a higher compression efficiency can be obtained by using an inter-prediction scheme, and for this purpose, Geometry-based Point Cloud Compression (G-PCC) in the Moving Picture Expert Group (MPEG) opened Inter-Exploratory Model (Inter-EM) which experiments on continuous LiDAR based point cloud frames compression through inter-prediction. The points of the LiDAR based point cloud have two different types of motion: global motion brought about by a vehicle with a LiDAR sensor and local motion generated by an object e.g., a walking person. Thus, Inter-EM consists of a compression structure in terms of both global and local motion, and the Inter-EM’s global motion compensation technology increases the compression efficiency via a single matrix describing the global motion of points. However, this is difficult to predict with a single matrix, which causes imprecise global motion estimation since the objects in a LiDAR-based point cloud show different global motion estimates according to object characteristics such as shape and position. Therefore, this paper proposes a global motion prediction and compensation scheme that considers the characteristics of objects for efficient compression of LiDAR-based point cloud frames. The proposed global motion prediction and compensation scheme achieved maximum gain of −22.0% and average of −9.4% in terms of the Bjontegaard-Delta-rate (BD-rate), and effectively compressed the LiDAR-based sparse point cloud.