Towards Efficient Online Compression of Incrementally Acquired Point Clouds

Abstract

We present a framework for the online compression of incrementally acquired point cloud data. For this, we extend an existing vector quantization-based offline point cloud compression algorithm to handle the challenges that arise from the envisioned online scenario. In particular, we learn a codebook in advance from training data and replace a computationally demanding part of the algorithm with a faster alternative. We show that the compression ratios and reconstruction quality are comparable to the offline version while the speed is sufficiently improved. Furthermore, we investigate how well codebooks that are generated from different amounts of training data generalize to larger sets of point cloud data.