Adaptive Smoothing Filter for Occupancy Map Compression
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current methods for compressing occupancy maps in volumetric video coding, such as V3C, face challenges in reducing bitrate while maintaining quality, especially when switching to lossy compression, which often results in artifacts like holes, broken surfaces, and false faces in 3D objects.
Innovation Solution
Implementing an adaptive smoothing filter algorithm on the occupancy map to discard edges, reducing bitrate, and encoding the adaptively smoothed map along with a filter threshold for efficient transmission and accurate reconstruction.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Quantity of substance
If lossy compression is applied to occupancy maps, then bitrate is reduced, but quality deteriorates with artifacts like holes, broken surfaces, and false faces
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies a smoothing filter to the occupancy map before compression encoding. This preliminary action prepares the data by reducing high-frequency variations that cause compression artifacts, ensuring that when lossy compression is applied, the reconstructed mesh maintains better geometric integrity and fewer artifacts like holes or broken surfaces.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent modifies the occupancy map data by applying a smoothing operation that changes the parameter values (occupancy probabilities) across pixels. This parameter transformation reduces abrupt transitions and creates a more continuous representation, which compresses more efficiently while preserving essential geometric features during reconstruction.
2Manufacturing precision
If adaptive smoothing filter is applied to occupancy map, then reconstruction quality improves, but computational complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The smoothing filter is applied locally to each pixel in the occupancy map, considering only its immediate neighbors. This local processing approach improves reconstruction quality by smoothly transitioning occupancy values without requiring complex global optimization algorithms, thus maintaining computational efficiency while enhancing output quality.
3Quantity of substance
If occupancy map edges are discarded through smoothing, then bitrate reduces, but measurement precision of occupancy boundaries decreases
Solution Approach 1:
By smoothing the occupancy map before compression, the patent performs a preliminary action that preserves the essential boundaries while reducing noisy or spurious edge information. This pre-processing ensures that the most significant occupancy boundaries remain intact for accurate reconstruction, while less important variations are softened to enable lower bitrate encoding.
Data Source
AI summary
An apparatus comprising circuitry configured to: receive as input a three-dimensional mesh represented as at least one geometry patch of an atlas and at least one texture patch of the atlas; create an occupancy map that indicates which pixels of the at least one geometry patch and the at least one texture patch are occupied having a valid value; wherein the occupancy map is configured to be used to reconstruct the mesh; enter lossy mode; apply, while in lossy mode, an adaptive smoothing filter algorithm to the occupancy map to discard at least one edge of the occupancy map, and to reduce a bitrate for transmission of the occupancy map; store, while in lossy mode, the adaptively smoothed occupancy map and at least one occupancy filter threshold; and encode the adaptively smoothed occupancy map and the at least one occupancy filter threshold into a bitstream.