Due to the increased popularity of augmented and virtual reality experiences, the interest in capturing the real world in multiple dimensions and in presenting it to users in an immersible fashion has never been higher. Distributing such representations enables users to freely navigate in multi-sensory 3D media experiences. Unfortunately, such representations require a large amount of data, not feasible for transmission on today's networks. Efficient compression technologies well adopted in the content chain are in high demand and are key components to democratize augmented and virtual reality applications. The Moving Picture Experts Group, MPEG, as one of the main standardization groups dealing with multimedia, identified the trend and started recently the process of building an open standard for compactly representing 3D point clouds, which are the 3D equivalent of the very well-known 2D pixels. This paper introduces the main developments and technical aspects of this ongoing standardization effort.

This article presents an overview of the recent standardization activities for point cloud compression (PCC). A point cloud is a 3D data representation used in diverse applications associated with immersive media including virtual/augmented reality, immersive telepresence, autonomous driving and cultural heritage archival. The international standard body for media compression, also known as the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG), is planning to release in 2020 two PCC standard specifications: video-based PCC (V-CC) and geometry-based PCC (G-PCC). V-PCC and G-PCC will be part of the ISO/IEC 23090 series on the coded representation of immersive media content. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of both codec algorithms and their coding performances. Moreover, we will also discuss certain unique aspects of point cloud compression.