Hint: hierarchical inter-frame correlation for one-shot point cloud sequence compression

Abstract

Deep learning has demonstrated strong capability in compressing point clouds. Within this area, entropy modeling for lossless compression is widely investigated. However, most methods rely solely on parent/sibling contexts and level-wise autoregression, which suffers from decoding latency on the order of 10^1-10^2 seconds. We propose HINT, a method that integrates temporal and spatial correlation for sequential point cloud compression. Specifically, it first uses a two-stage temporal feature extraction: (i) a parent-level existence map and (ii) a child-level neighborhood lookup in the previous frame. These cues are fused with the spatial features via element-wise addition and encoded with a group-wise strategy. Experimental results show that HINT achieves encoding and decoding time at 105 ms and 140 ms, respectively, equivalent to 49.6x and 21.6x acceleration in comparison with G-PCC, while achieving up to 43.6% bitrate reduction and consistently outperforming the spatial-only baseline (RENO).

This paper has been accepted at IEEE ICASSP 2026