Copyright (c) 2017-2021, Stichting Centrum Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI).

This repository is a compression library for cwipc pointcloud objects. It is part of the cwipc suite, https://github.com/cwi-dis/cwipc, and should generally be installed or built as part of that suite.

cwipc_codec

This distribution contains a compressor and decompressor for pointclouds. It uses the cwipc abstract object to represent pointclouds.

It is a modified version of the cwi-pcl-codec distribution, from http://github.com/cwi-dis/cwi-pcl-codec. Both distributions share the same codec, described in the following journal paper:

(R. Mekuria, K. Blom, and P. Cesar, "Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a Point Cloud Codec for Tele-Immersive Video," IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 27(4): 828 -842, 2017

When cwipc_codec is built from source (as part of the cwipc suite) it is possible to use the codec using the same API as specified in that paper and in the cwi-pcl-codec repository. Simply add the include (and possibly source) directory to your project.

Use

• cwipc_encode compresses a .ply pointcloud file to a .cwicpc compressed pointcloud file.
• cwipc_decode decompresses a .cwicpc compressed file to a .ply pointcloud file.
• cwipc_grab --compress will compress pointclouds before saving them to disk.
• cwipc_view --playback will decompress .cwicpc files on the fly.
• The various tools that produce or consume pointcloud streams will use the encoder and decoder by default.

Check include/cwipc_codec/api.h to see how to use the codec from your code. The Python API is nearly identical, inspect the cwipc.codec module.

Evaluation program

When building from source there is a test program included:

• evaluate_compression allows for evaluation of the algorithm, see its readme file for details.