# DiffCom: Decoupled Sparse Priors Guided Diffusion Compression for Point Clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.13860 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13860/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D, point cloud and scene generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 34 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [3D, point cloud and scene generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/3d-point-cloud-and-scene-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [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)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [Diffusion Probabilistic Models for 3D Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01458/) (2021)
- [Point-E: A System for Generating 3D Point Clouds from Complex Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08751/) (2022)
- [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)
- [3D Shape Generation and Completion through Point-Voxel Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03670/) (2021)
- [Point-Voxel CNN for Efficient 3D Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03739/) (2019)
- [Shape As Points: A Differentiable Poisson Solver](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03452/) (2021)
- [Point-SLAM: Dense Neural Point Cloud-based SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04278/) (2023)
- [Cascaded Refinement Network for Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03327/) (2020)
- [Motion-aware 3D Gaussian Splatting for Efficient Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11447/) (2024)
- [Visual Point Cloud Forecasting enables Scalable Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17655/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Learned Point Cloud Geometry Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12037/) (2019)
- [OctAttention: Octree-Based Large-Scale Contexts Model for Point Cloud Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06028/) (2022)
- [Learning Convolutional Transforms for Lossy Point Cloud Geometry Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08548/) (2019)
- [Controllable Mesh Generation Through Sparse Latent Point Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07938/) (2023)
- [Density-preserving Deep Point Cloud Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12684/) (2022)
- [Sketch and Text Guided Diffusion Model for Colored Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02874/) (2023)
- [Reduced Reference Perceptual Quality Model and Application to Rate Control for 3D Point Cloud Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12688/) (2020)
- [Deep AutoEncoder-based Lossy Geometry Compression for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03691/) (2019)
- [Learning-based lossless compression of 3D point cloud geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14700/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [LangMap: A Human-Verified Benchmark for Hierarchical Open-Vocabulary Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02220/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Lossy compression relies on an autoencoder to transform a point cloud into latent points for storage, leaving the inherent redundancy of latent representations unexplored. To reduce redundancy in latent points, we propose a diffusion-based framework guided by sparse priors that achieves high reconstruction quality, especially at low bitrates. Our approach features an efficient dual-density data flow that relaxes size constraints on latent points. It hybridizes a probabilistic conditional diffusion model to encapsulate essential details for reconstruction within sparse priors, which are decoupled hierarchically into intra- and inter-point priors. Specifically, our DiffCom encodes the original point cloud into latent points and decoupled sparse priors through separate encoders. To dynamically attend to geometric and semantic cues from the priors at each encoding and decoding layer, we employ an attention-guided latent denoiser conditioned on the decoupled priors. Additionally, we integrate the local distribution into the arithmetic encoder and decoder to enhance local context modeling of the sparse points. The original point cloud is reconstructed through a point decoder. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our approach achieves a superior rate-distortion trade-off, as evidenced by extensive evaluations on the ShapeNet dataset and standard test datasets from the MPEG PCC Group.