# Point Cloud Compression via Constrained Optimal Transport

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.08236 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08236/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [Computational Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00567/) (2018)
- [End-to-end Optimized Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01704/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Lossy Compression: The Rate-Distortion-Perception Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07821/) (2019)
- [PU-GAN: a Point Cloud Upsampling Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10844/) (2019)
- [SampleNet: Differentiable Point Cloud Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03663/) (2019)
- [Multiscale Point Cloud Geometry Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03799/) (2020)
- [OctSqueeze: Octree-Structured Entropy Model for LiDAR Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07178/) (2020)
- [Sparse Tensor-based Multiscale Representation for Point Cloud Geometry Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10633/) (2021)
- [VoxelContext-Net: An Octree based Framework for Point Cloud Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02158/) (2021)
- [Learned Point Cloud Geometry Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12037/) (2019)
- [Learning Convolutional Transforms for Lossy Point Cloud Geometry Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08548/) (2019)
- [Universal Rate-Distortion-Perception Representations for Lossy Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10311/) (2021)
- [Improved Deep Point Cloud Geometry Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09043/) (2020)
- [MuSCLE: Multi Sweep Compression of LiDAR using Deep Entropy Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07590/) (2020)
- [Density-preserving Deep Point Cloud Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12684/) (2022)
- [A Geometric View of Optimal Transportation and Generative Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05488/) (2017)
- [Deep AutoEncoder-based Lossy Geometry Compression for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03691/) (2019)
- [On Perceptual Lossy Compression: The Cost of Perceptual Reconstruction and An Optimal Training Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02782/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Reflectance Prediction-based Knowledge Distillation for Robust 3D Object Detection in Compressed Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17442/) (2025)
- [DiffCom: Decoupled Sparse Priors Guided Diffusion Compression for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13860/) (2024)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Point Cloud Compression at Low Bit-Rates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13316/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a novel point cloud compression method COT-PCC by formulating the task as a constrained optimal transport (COT) problem. COT-PCC takes the bitrate of compressed features as an extra constraint of optimal transport (OT) which learns the distribution transformation between original and reconstructed points. Specifically, the formulated COT is implemented with a generative adversarial network (GAN) and a bitrate loss for training. The discriminator measures the Wasserstein distance between input and reconstructed points, and a generator calculates the optimal mapping between distributions of input and reconstructed point cloud. Moreover, we introduce a learnable sampling module for downsampling in the compression procedure. Extensive results on both sparse and dense point cloud datasets demonstrate that COT-PCC outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both CD and PSNR metrics. Source codes are available at urlhttps://github.com/cognaclee/PCC-COT.