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Due to the increased popularity of augmented (AR) and virtual (VR) reality experiences, the interest in representing the real world in an immersive fashion has never been higher. Distributing such representations enables users all over the world to freely navigate in never seen before media experiences. Unfortunately, such representations require a large amount of data, not feasible for transmission on today's networks. Thus, efficient compression technologies are in high demand. This paper proposes an approach to compress 3D video data utilizing 2D video coding technology. The proposed solution was developed to address the needs of "tele-immersive" applications, such as VR, AR, or mixed reality with "Six Degrees of Freedom" capabilities. Volumetric video data is projected on 2D image planes and compressed using standard 2D video coding solutions. A key benefit of this approach is its compatibility with readily available 2D video coding infrastructure. Furthermore, objective and subjective evaluation shows significant improvement in coding efficiency over reference technology. The proposed solution was contributed and evaluated in international standardization. Although it is was not selected as the winning proposal, as very similar solution has been selected developed since then. publishedVersion

With the recent improvements in acquisition techniques for 3D media applications, it has become easier to collect 3D data, for example, dynamic point cloud data. Such point clouds consist of a large amount of 3D coordinates, which describe a scene or object in 3D space by its geometry and texture attributes. Moreover, they are an effective representation of 3D environments for applications such as Augmented Reality or Virtual Reality. One of the main problems for such data is that the number of points is typically too large to allow for real-time transmission or efficient storage. Thus, compressing such 3D data is a key issue to reduce the amount of required bandwidth or memory. This paper presents a method for efficient compression of dynamic point cloud data within the current MPEG standardization framework for dynamic point cloud compression. The key benefit of the presented work is the reduced number of encoded and decoded 3D points compared to the reference framework, thus encoding and decoding complexity is reduced significantly. Objective results show a speed-up of around 35–40% in coding times. Furthermore, reconstruction quality is preserved, thus reducing bit rate requirements by up to 30%. Visual results verify the improved reconstruction quality, and compared to the reference at the same computational complexity, coding efficiency is improved by over 40%.

Due to the increased popularity of augmented and virtual reality experiences, the interest in representing the real world in an immersive fashion has never been higher. Distributing such representations enables users all over the world to freely navigate in never seen before media experiences. Unfortunately, such representations require a large amount of data, not feasible for transmission on today’s networks. Thus, efficient compression technologies are in high demand. This paper proposes an approach to compress 3D video data utilizing 2D video coding technology. The proposed solution was developed to address the needs of ‘tele-immersive’ applications, such as virtual (VR), augmented (AR) or mixed (MR) reality with Six Degrees of Freedom (6DoF) capabilities. Volumetric video data is projected on 2D image planes and compressed using standard 2D video coding solutions. A key benefit of this approach is its compatibility with readily available 2D video coding infrastructure. Furthermore, objective and subjective evaluation shows significant improvement in coding efficiency over reference technology.