US Patent 12094179 Quantized depths for projection point cloud compression

A system comprises an encoder configured to compress attribute information and/or spatial information for a point cloud and/or a decoder configured to decompress compressed attribute and/or spatial information for the point cloud. The encoder is configured to convert a point cloud into an image based representation. The encoder packs patch images into an image frame and fills empty spaces in the image frame with a padding. The encoder is also configured to determine quantized minimum depths and/or maximum depths patch images in the image frames, wherein depth information is signaled relative to the quantized minimum depth.