Point Cloud Compression with Range Image-Based Entropy Model for Autonomous Driving

Sukai Wang, Ming Liu ;

"For autonomous driving systems, the storage cost and transmission speed of the large-scale point clouds become an important bottleneck because of their large volume. In this paper, we propose a range image-based three-stage framework to compress the scanning LiDAR’s point clouds using the entropy model. In our three-stage framework, we refine the coarser range image by converting the regression problem into the limited classification problem to improve the performance of generating accurate point clouds. And in the feature extraction part, we propose a novel attention Conv layer to fuse the voxel-based 3D features in the 2D range image. Compared with the Octree-based compression methods, the range image compression with the entropy model performs better in the autonomous driving scene. Experiments on LiDARs with different lines and in different scenarios show that our proposed compression scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in reconstruction quality and downstream tasks by a wide margin."