Tangent-plane-continuity maximization based 3D point compression

Octree decomposition has been proven to be one of the most successful approaches for progressive geometry compression of 3D models. To exploit the spatial correlation among the points, people strive to improve the estimation of the non-emptiness of the child-cells during space subdivision. We observe an intrinsic property of 3D models that their tangent planes tend to be continuous at high fidelity layers. Thus, we take the tangent-plane-continuity as a criterion for the non-emptiness estimation, and design a 3D model compression scheme based on this idea. The experimental results show that the proposed codec improves the quality by up to 6dB at equivalent bit-rates.