Efficient Implicit Neural Compression of Point Clouds via Learnable Activation in Latent Space

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs), also known as neural fields, have emerged as a powerful paradigm in deep learning, parameterizing continuous spatial fields using coordinate-based neural networks. In this paper, we propose PICO, an INR-based framework for static point cloud compression. Unlike prevailing encoder-decoder paradigms, we decompose the point cloud compression task into two separate stages: geometry compression and attribute compression, each with distinct INR optimization objectives. Inspired by Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs), we introduce a novel network architecture, LeAFNet, which leverages learnable activation functions in the latent space to better approximate the target signal's implicit function. By reformulating point cloud compression as neural parameter compression, we further improve compression efficiency through quantization and entropy coding. Experimental results demonstrate that LeAFNet outperforms conventional MLPs in INR-based point cloud compression. Furthermore, PICO achieves superior geometry compression performance compared to the current MPEG point cloud compression standard, yielding an average improvement of 4.92 dB in D1 PSNR. In joint geometry and attribute compression, our approach exhibits highly competitive results, with an average PCQM gain of 2.7 × 10-3.