UGAE: Unified Geometry and Attribute Enhancement for G-PCC Compressed Point Clouds.

Abstract

Lossy compression of point clouds reduces storage and transmission costs; however, it inevitably leads to irreversible distortion in geometry structure and attribute information. To address these issues, we propose a unified geometry and attribute enhancement (UGAE) framework, which consists of three core components: post-geometry enhancement (PoGE), pre-attribute enhancement (PAE), and post-attribute enhancement (PoAE). In PoGE, a Transformer-based sparse convolutional U-Net is used to reconstruct the geometry structure with high precision by predicting voxel occupancy probabilities. Building on the refined geometry structure, PAE introduces an innovative enhanced geometry-guided recoloring strategy, which uses a detail-aware K-Nearest Neighbors (DA-KNN) method to achieve accurate recoloring and effectively preserve high-frequency details before attribute compression. Finally, at the decoder side, PoAE uses an attribute residual prediction network with a weighted mean squared error (W-MSE) loss to enhance the quality of high-frequency regions while maintaining the fidelity of low-frequency regions. UGAE significantly outperformed existing methods on three benchmark datasets: 8iVFB, Owlii, and MVUB. Compared to the latest G-PCC test model (TMC13v29), in terms of total bitrate setting, UGAE achieved an average BD-PSNR gain of 9.98 dB and -90.54% BD-bitrate for geometry under the D1 metric, as well as a 3.34 dB BD-PSNR improvement with -55.53% BD-bitrate for attributes. Additionally, it improved perceptual quality significantly. Our source code will be released on GitHub at: https://github.com/yuanhui0325/UGAE.