TAFA-GSGC: Group-wise Scalable Point Cloud Geometry Compression with Progressive Residual Refinement

Abstract: Scalable compression is essential for bandwidth-adaptive transmission, yet most learned codecs are optimized for a fixed rate-distortion point, making rate adaptation costly due to re-encoding or maintaining multiple bitstreams. In this work, we propose TAFA-GSGC, a scalable learned point cloud geometry codec that enables multi-quality decoding from a single bitstream and a single trained model. TAFA-GSGC combines layered residual refinement with channel-group entropy coding, and introduces Target-Aligned Feature Aggregation module to reduce cross-layer redundancy in enhancement residuals. Our framework supports up to 9 decodable quality levels with monotonic quality improvement as more subbitstreams are received, while maintaining strong compression efficiency. Compared with the baseline PCGCv2, TAFA-GSGC attains comparable and slightly better RD performance, achieving average BD-Rate savings of -4.99% in D1 and -5.92% in D2.