3D point cloud lossy compression using quadric surfaces

The presence of 3D sensors in hand-held or head-mounted smart devices has motivated many researchers around the globe to devise algorithms to manage 3D point cloud data efficiently and economically. This paper presents a novel lossy compression technique to compress and decompress 3D point cloud data that will save storage space on smart devices as well as minimize the use of bandwidth when transferred over the network. The idea presented in this research exploits geometric information of the scene by using quadric surface representation of the point cloud. A region of a point cloud can be represented by the coefficients of quadric surface when the boundary conditions are known. Thus, a set of quadric surface coefficients and their associated boundary conditions are stored as a compressed point cloud and used to decompress. An added advantage of proposed technique is its flexibility to decompress the cloud as a dense or a course cloud. We compared our technique with state-of-the-art 3D lossless and lossy compression techniques on a number of standard publicly available datasets with varying the structure complexities.