US Patent 10939129 Point cloud compression

A system comprises an encoder configured to compress attribute information and/or spatial for a point cloud and/or a decoder configured to decompress compressed attribute and/or spatial information for the point cloud. To compress the attribute and/or spatial information, the encoder is configured to convert a point cloud into an image based representation. Also, the decoder is configured to generate a decompressed point cloud based on an image based representation of a point cloud. The encoder generates an occupancy map and may also encode the occupancy map as an image based representation. In some embodiments, a video encoder encodes image based representations of spatial information for the points of the point cloud, image based representations of attribute values for points of the point cloud, and an image based representation of an occupancy map for the spatial and attribute images.