A learning-based adaptive loop filter is developed for the Geometry-based
Point Cloud Compression (G-PCC) standard to reduce attribute compression
artifacts. The proposed method first generates multiple Most-Probable Sample
Offsets (MPSOs) as potential compression distortion approximations, and then
linearly weights them for artifact mitigation. As such, we drive the filtered
reconstruction as close to the uncompressed PCA as possible. To this end, we
devise a Compression Artifact Reduction Network (CARNet) which consists of two
consecutive processing phases: MPSOs derivation and MPSOs combination. The
MPSOs derivation uses a two-stream network to model local neighborhood
variations from direct spatial embedding and frequency-dependent embedding,
where sparse convolutions are utilized to best aggregate information from
sparsely and irregularly distributed points. The MPSOs combination is guided by
the least square error metric to derive weighting coefficients on the fly to
further capture content dynamics of input PCAs. The CARNet is implemented as an
in-loop filtering tool of the GPCC, where those linear weighting coefficients
are encapsulated into the bitstream with negligible bit rate overhead.
Experimental results demonstrate significant improvement over the latest GPCC
both subjectively and objectively.Comment: 13pages, 8figure