Low-complexity patch projection method for efficient and lightweight point-cloud compression

The point cloud provides viewers with intuitive geometric understanding but requires a huge amount of data. Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) has developed video-based point-cloud compression in the range of 300–700. As the compression rate increases, the complexity increases to the extent that it takes 101.36 s to compress one frame in an experimental environment using a personal computer. To realize real-time point-cloud compression processing, the direct patch projection (DPP) method proposed herein simplifies the complex patch segmentation process by classifying and projecting points according to their geometric positions. The DPP method decreases the complexity of the patch segmentation from 25.75 s to 0.10 s per frame, and the entire process becomes 8.76 times faster than the conventional one. Consequently, this proposed DPP method yields similar peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) outcomes to those of the conventional method at reduced times (4.7–5.5 times) at the cost of bitrate overhead. The objective and subjective results show that the proposed DPP method can be considered when low-complexity requirements are required in lightweight device environments.