Abstract:

Point cloud is an emerging data format useful for various applications such as holographic display, autonomous vehicle, and augmented reality. Conventionally, communications of point cloud data have relied on digital compression and digital modulation for three-dimensional (3D) data streaming. However, such digital-based delivery schemes have fundamental issues called cliff and leveling effects, where the 3D reconstruction quality is a step function in terms of wireless channel quality. We propose a novel scheme of point cloud delivery, called HoloCast+, to overcome cliff and leveling effects. Specifically, our method utilizes hybrid digital-analog coding, integrating digital compression and analog coding based on graph Fourier transform (GFT), to gracefully improve 3D reconstruction quality with the improvement of channel quality. We demonstrate that HoloCast+ offers better 3D reconstruction quality in terms of the symmetric mean square error (sMSE) by up to 18.3 dB and 10.5 dB, respectively, compared to conventional digital-based and analog-based delivery methods in wireless fading environments.