patchVVC: A Real-time Compression Framework for Streaming Volumetric Videos

Nowadays, volumetric video has emerged as an attractive multimedia application, which provides highly immersive watching experiences. However, streaming the volumetric video demands prohibitively high bandwidth. Thus, effectively compressing its underlying point cloud frames is essential to deploying the volumetric videos. The existing compression techniques are either 3D-based or 2D-based, but they still have drawbacks when being deployed in practice. The 2D-based methods compress the videos in an effective but slow manner, while the 3D-based methods feature high coding speeds but low compression ratios. In this paper, we propose patchVVC, a 3D-based compression framework that reaches both a high compression ratio and a real-time decoding speed. More importantly, patchVVC is designed based on point cloud patches, which makes it friendly to an field of view adaptive streaming system that further reduces the bandwidth demands. The evaluation shows patchVCC achieves the real-time decoding speed and the comparable compression ratios as the representative 2D-based scheme, V-PCC, in an FoV-adaptive streaming scenario.