Cloudini – point cloud compression library

Cloudini (pronounced with Italian accent) is a pointcloud compression library.

Its main focus is speed, but it still achieves very good compression ratios.

Its main use cases are:

• To improve the storage of datasets containing pointcloud data (being a notable example rosbags).

• Decrease the bandwidth used when streaming pointclouds over a network.

It works seamlessly with PCL and ROS, but the main library can be compiled and used independently, if needed.

The compression ratio is hard to predict because it depends on the way the original data is encoded.

For example, ROS pointcloud messages are extremely inefficient, because they include some "padding" in the message that, in extreme cases, may reach up to 50%.

(Yes, you heard correctly, almost 50% of that 10 Gb rosbag is useless padding).

But, in general, you may expect considerably better compression and faster encoding/decoding than ZTD or LZ4 alone.

These are two random examples using real-world data from LiDARs.

• Channels: XYZ, Intensity, no padding

• Channels: XYZ, intensity, ring (int16), timestamp (double), with padding

If you are a ROS user, you can test the compression ratio and speed yourself, running the application rosbag_benchmark on any rosbag containing a sensor_msgs::msg::PointCloud2 topic.

The algorithm contains two steps:

1. Encoding the pointcloud, channel by channel.
2. Compression using either LZ4 or ZSTD.

The encoding is lossy for floating point channels (typically the X, Y, Z channels) and lossless for RGBA and integer channels.

Now, I know that when you read the word "lossy" you may think about grainy JPEGS images. Don't.

The encoder applies a quantization using a resolution provided by the user.

Typical LiDARs have an accuracy/noise in the order of +/- 2 cm. Therefore, it using a resolution of 1 mm (+/- 0.5 mm max quantization error) is comparatively a very conservative option.

But, if you are really paranoid, and decide to use a resolution of 100 microns, you still achieve excellent compression ratios!

It should also be noted that this two-step compression strategy has a negative overhead, i.e. it is actually faster than using LZ4 or ZSTD alone.

See point_cloud_transport plugins for reference about how they are used.

A command line tool that, given a rosbag (limited to MCAP format), converts all sensor_msgs/msg/PointCloud2 topics into compressed point_cloud_interfaces/msg/CompressedPointCloud2 of vice-versa.

Encoding/decoding is faster than general-purpose compression algorithms and achieves a better compression ratio at 1mm resolution.

Interestingly, it can be compiled without ROS installed in your system!