This paper addresses the problem of compression of 3D point cloud sequences that are characterized by moving 3D positions and color attributes. As temporally successive point cloud frames are similar, motion estimation is key to effective compression
of these sequences. It however remains a challenging problem as the point cloud frames have varying numbers of points without explicit correspondence information. We represent the time-varying geometry of these sequences with a set of graphs, and consider 3D positions and color attributes of the points clouds as signals on the vertices of the graphs. We then cast motion estimation as a feature matching problem between successive graphs. The motion is estimated on a sparse set of representative vertices using new spectral graph wavelet descriptors. A dense motion field is eventually interpolated by solving a graph-based regularization problem. The estimated motion is finally used for removing the temporal redundancy in the predictive coding of the 3D positions and the color characteristics of the point cloud sequences. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is able to accurately estimate the motion between consecutive frames. Moreover, motion estimation is shown to bring significant improvement in terms of the overall compression performance of the sequence. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that exploits both the spatial correlation inside each frame (through the graph) and the temporal correlation between the frames (through the motion estimation) to compress the color and the geometry of 3D point cloud sequences in an efficient way.
In sparse signal representation, the choice of a dictionary often involves a tradeoff between two desirable properties -- the ability to adapt to specific signal data and a fast implementation of the dictionary. To sparsely represent signals residing
on weighted graphs, an additional design challenge is to incorporate the intrinsic geometric structure of the irregular data domain into the atoms of the dictionary. In this work, we propose a parametric dictionary learning algorithm to design data-adapted, structured dictionaries that sparsely represent graph signals. In particular, we model graph signals as combinations of overlapping local patterns. We impose the constraint that each dictionary is a concatenation of subdictionaries, with each subdictionary being a polynomial of the graph Laplacian matrix, representing a single pattern translated to different areas of the graph. The learning algorithm adapts the patterns to a training set of graph signals. Experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the dictionaries learned by the proposed algorithm are competitive with and often better than unstructured dictionaries learned by state-of-the-art numerical learning algorithms in terms of sparse approximation of graph signals. In contrast to the unstructured dictionaries, however, the dictionaries learned by the proposed algorithm feature localized atoms and can be implemented in a computationally efficient manner in signal processing tasks such as compression, denoising, and classification.
We consider the problem of distributed average consensus in a sensor network where sensors exchange quantized information with their neighbors. We propose a novel quantization scheme that exploits the increasing correlation between the values exchang
ed by the sensors throughout the iterations of the consensus algorithm. A low complexity, uniform quantizer is implemented in each sensor, and refined quantization is achieved by progressively reducing the quantization intervals during the convergence of the consensus algorithm. We propose a recurrence relation for computing the quantization parameters that depend on the network topology and the communication rate. We further show that the recurrence relation can lead to a simple exponential model for the size of the quantization step size over the iterations, whose parameters can be computed a priori. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the progressive quantization scheme that leads to the consensus solution even at low communication rate.
