# VoxelContext-Net: An Octree based Framework for Point Cloud Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.02158 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02158/

## Key facts

- Cited by 61 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [End-to-end Optimized Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01704/) (2016)
- [Joint Autoregressive and Hierarchical Priors for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02736/) (2018)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [DVC: An End-to-end Deep Video Compression Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00101/) (2018)
- [Video Compression through Image Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06919/) (2018)
- [OctSqueeze: Octree-Structured Entropy Model for LiDAR Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07178/) (2020)
- [Content Adaptive and Error Propagation Aware Deep Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11282/) (2020)
- [Improving Deep Video Compression by Resolution-adaptive Flow Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05982/) (2020)
- [MuSCLE: Multi Sweep Compression of LiDAR using Deep Entropy Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07590/) (2020)
- [Deep AutoEncoder-based Lossy Geometry Compression for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03691/) (2019)
- [Comments on "Compression of 3D Point Clouds Using a Region-Adaptive Hierarchical Transform"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09146/) (2018)
- [CAE-LO: LiDAR Odometry Leveraging Fully Unsupervised Convolutional Auto-Encoder for Interest Point Detection and Feature Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01354/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [Sparse Tensor-based Multiscale Representation for Point Cloud Geometry Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10633/) (2021)
- [OctAttention: Octree-Based Large-Scale Contexts Model for Point Cloud Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06028/) (2022)
- [OctreeOcc: Efficient and Multi-Granularity Occupancy Prediction Using Octree Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03774/) (2023)
- [Density-preserving Deep Point Cloud Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12684/) (2022)
- [WOMD-LiDAR: Raw Sensor Dataset Benchmark for Motion Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03834/) (2023)
- [3DAC: Learning Attribute Compression for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09931/) (2022)
- [Inter-Frame Compression for Dynamic Point Cloud Geometry Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12554/) (2022)
- [RIDDLE: Lidar Data Compression with Range Image Deep Delta Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01738/) (2022)
- [GRASP-Net: Geometric Residual Analysis and Synthesis for Point Cloud Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04401/) (2022)
- [SCP: Spherical-Coordinate-based Learned Point Cloud Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12535/) (2023)
- [SPAC: Sampling-based Progressive Attribute Compression for Dense Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10293/) (2024)
- [Point Cloud Compression with Sibling Context and Surface Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00760/) (2022)
- [Multiscale Latent-Guided Entropy Model for LiDAR Point Cloud Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12512/) (2022)
- [Geometric Prior Based Deep Human Point Cloud Geometry Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01309/) (2023)
- [IPDAE: Improved Patch-Based Deep Autoencoder for Lossy Point Cloud Geometry Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02519/) (2022)
- [ECM-OPCC: Efficient Context Model for Octree-based Point Cloud Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10916/) (2022)
- [Rate-aware Compression for NeRF-based Volumetric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05322/) (2024)
- [PIVOT-Net: Heterogeneous Point-Voxel-Tree-based Framework for Point Cloud Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07243/) (2024)
- [Efficient LiDAR Point Cloud Geometry Compression Through Neighborhood Point Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12573/) (2022)
- [Learning Dynamic Point Cloud Compression via Hierarchical Inter-frame Block Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05356/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Prior-based Super Resolution for Point Cloud Geometry Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11250/) (2024)
- [Enhancing context models for point cloud geometry compression with context feature residuals and multi-loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08520/) (2024)
- [Towards Point Cloud Compression for Machine Perception: A Simple and Strong Baseline by Learning the Octree Depth Level Predictor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00791/) (2024)
- [Enhancing octree-based context models for point cloud geometry compression with attention-based child node number prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08528/) (2024)
- [Fast Point Cloud Geometry Compression with Context-based Residual Coding and INR-based Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02966/) (2024)
- [Rendering-Oriented 3D Point Cloud Attribute Compression using Sparse Tensor-based Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07899/) (2024)
- [Voxel-based Point Cloud Geometry Compression with Space-to-Channel Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18283/) (2025)
- [ROI-Guided Point Cloud Geometry Compression Towards Human and Machine Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14240/) (2025)
- [How Many Tokens Do 3D Point Cloud Transformer Architectures Really Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05449/) (2025)
- [Learning Neural Volumetric Field for Point Cloud Geometry Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05589/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose a two-stage deep learning framework called VoxelContext-Net for both static and dynamic point cloud compression. Taking advantages of both octree based methods and voxel based schemes, our approach employs the voxel context to compress the octree structured data. Specifically, we first extract the local voxel representation that encodes the spatial neighbouring context information for each node in the constructed octree. Then, in the entropy coding stage, we propose a voxel context based deep entropy model to compress the symbols of non-leaf nodes in a lossless way. Furthermore, for dynamic point cloud compression, we additionally introduce the local voxel representations from the temporal neighbouring point clouds to exploit temporal dependency. More importantly, to alleviate the distortion from the octree construction procedure, we propose a voxel context based 3D coordinate refinement method to produce more accurate reconstructed point cloud at the decoder side, which is applicable to both static and dynamic point cloud compression. The comprehensive experiments on both static and dynamic point cloud benchmark datasets(e.g., ScanNet and Semantic KITTI) clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our newly proposed method VoxelContext-Net for 3D point cloud geometry compression.