Realtime Management Tool for Massive 3D Point Clouds

Luis Omar Álvarez Mures

Final Year Project (Trabajo Fin de Grado), University of A Coruña, Spain
Supervised by Emilio J. Padrón and Alberto Jaspe-Villanueva, UDC

Realtime Management Tool for Massive 3D Point Clouds teaser

PDF UDC library record 

@MastersThesis{Mures:2014:RMT,
 author = {Luis Omar {\'A}lvarez Mures},
 title = {Realtime Management Tool for Massive {3D} Point Clouds},
 school = {University of A Coru{\~n}a},
 year = {2014},
 note = {Supervisors: Alberto Jaspe-Villanueva and Emilio J. Padr{\'o}n},
 }
Degree
Final Year Project (Trabajo Fin de Grado), Degree in Computer Engineering, mention in Software Engineering
Institution
University of A Coruña, Spain
Student
Luis Omar Álvarez Mures
Supervisors
Emilio J. Padrón and Alberto Jaspe-Villanueva, UDC
Defended
September 2014

Abstract

The objective of this project is designing and implementing a multi-platform point-based rendering visualizer that allows the management and interactive manipulation of big 3D point clouds. These clouds can be obtained using a LIDAR scanner or cheaper alternatives like KINECT. These systems can nowadays generate data-sets with huge amounts of point data, position, color, normals, reflectivity, etc. As a consequence, these point clouds will not fit on system RAM and will have to reside in an HDD. Due to this fact, real-time rendering of massive point clouds is a complex task. The resulting software tool developed in this project, will offer the end user the functionality necessary for working with these types of datasets. Including a complete 3D visualizer, with advanced OpenGL point-rendering capabilities, multiple point cloud support, multiple cameras, multi-resolution capabilities, point cloud transformation and preprocessing, distance measurements, object segmentation, CAD exportation of segmented objects, etc. To implement all of these features, we will utilize PCM. PCM is a project in development from the University of A Coruña, that provides a series of low level tools for working with point clouds on commodity hardware. This project will not only extend PCM with the aforementioned functionality and a high level software tool for the end user, but will improve the existing code and some performance aspects of PCM.

Omar’s final year project turned the Point Cloud Manager library into an interactive tool for editing and managing massive point clouds in real time, the basis of the 2016 book chapters on PCM.