US Patent 11288843 Lossy compression of point cloud occupancy maps

A decoding device, an encoding device and methods for point cloud encoding and decoding are disclosed. The method for decoding includes decoding an attribute frame, a geometry frame, and occupancy map frame from a received bitstream. The attribute and geometry frames include pixels representing points of a 3D point cloud and the occupancy map frame includes values. The method also includes generating a binary occupancy map frame based on comparing the values in the occupancy map frame to a scaling threshold to determine whether the pixels included in the attribute and geometry frames at corresponding positions in the binary occupancy map frame are valid pixels. The method further includes generating the 3D point cloud using the attribute frame, the geometry frame, and the binary occupancy map frame.