Multiple Description Coding for Point Cloud

Anthony Chen, Shiwen Mao, Zhu Li, Minrui Xu, Hongliang Zhang, Dusit Niyato, Zhu Han

Abstract: With the advances of Virtual Reality (VR) / Augmented Reality (AR), there arises a compelling need for transmission of point clouds over lossy channels (e.g., a 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) link that tends to be easily blocked). In this paper, we revisit the traditional Multiple Description Coding (MDC) concept and propose a simple point cloud MDC scheme that takes advantage of voxelization and is built upon a typical geometric point cloud compression codec. Our simulation study demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed scheme, as well as the tradeoff between compression efficiency and point cloud quality gain offered by MDC.