| CPC H04N 19/91 (2014.11) [G06T 9/001 (2013.01); G06T 9/40 (2013.01); H03M 7/405 (2013.01); H03M 7/6094 (2013.01); H04N 19/96 (2014.11)] | 18 Claims |

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1. A method of encoding a point cloud to generate a bitstream of compressed point cloud data, the point cloud being defined in a tree structure having a plurality of nodes having parent-child relationships and that represent the geometry of a volumetric space recursively split into sub-volumes and containing the points of the point cloud, the method comprising:
traversing the tree to entropy encode patterns of occupancy for sets of child nodes, wherein a pattern of occupancy indicates which of the sub-volumes associated with the respective child nodes contain at least one point, and wherein the traversing includes:
for a current node associated with a sub-volume,
determining that points within the sub-volume associated with the current node are eligible for direct coding based on an occupancy pattern for a parent node to the current node;
inserting a flag in the bitstream indicating the direct coding is to be used to encode the current node; and
entropy encoding positional coordinate data for at least one of the points within the sub-volume.
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