Surface Lightfield Support in Video-based Point Cloud Coding

Surface light-field (SLF) is a mapping of a set of color vectors to a set of ray vectors that originate at a point on a surface. It enables rendering photo-realistic view points in extended reality applications. However, the amount of data required to represent SLF is significantly more. Therefore, storing and distributing SLFs requires an efficient compressed representation. The Motion Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) has an on-going standard activity for the compression of point clouds. Until recently, this activity was targeting compression of single texture information, but is now investigating view dependent textures. In this paper, we propose methods to optimize coding of view dependent color without compromising on the visual quality. Our results show the optimizations provided in this paper reduce coded HEVC bit rate by 36% for the all-Intra configuration and 48% for the random-access configuration, when compared to coding all texture independently.