# Variable Rate Compression for Raw 3D Point Clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.13862 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13862/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [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)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [Lossy Image Compression with Compressive Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00395/) (2017)
- [Soft-to-Hard Vector Quantization for End-to-End Learning Compressible Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00648/) (2017)
- [Conditional Probability Models for Deep Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04260/) (2018)
- [Variable Rate Deep Image Compression With a Conditional Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04802/) (2019)
- [End-to-end optimization of nonlinear transform codes for perceptual quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.05006/) (2016)
- [Learning Convolutional Transforms for Lossy Point Cloud Geometry Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08548/) (2019)
- [Improved Deep Point Cloud Geometry Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09043/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Geometric Prior Based Deep Human Point Cloud Geometry Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01309/) (2023)
- [PIVOT-Net: Heterogeneous Point-Voxel-Tree-based Framework for Point Cloud Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07243/) (2024)
- [FLaTEC: Frequency-Disentangled Latent Triplanes for Efficient Compression of LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20065/) (2025)
- [MEGA-PCC: A Mamba-based Efficient Approach for Joint Geometry and Attribute Point Cloud Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22463/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose a novel variable rate deep compression architecture that operates on raw 3D point cloud data. The majority of learning-based point cloud compression methods work on a downsampled representation of the data. Moreover, many existing techniques require training multiple networks for different compression rates to generate consolidated point clouds of varying quality. In contrast, our network is capable of explicitly processing point clouds and generating a compressed description at a comprehensive range of bitrates. Furthermore, our approach ensures that there is no loss of information as a result of the voxelization process and the density of the point cloud does not affect the encoder/decoder performance. An extensive experimental evaluation shows that our model obtains state-of-the-art results, it is computationally efficient, and it can work directly with point cloud data thus avoiding an expensive voxelized representation.