Visualization of massive point clouds

Nowadays, more and more users need to deal with large point clouds coming from laser scanning or image-based reconstruction techniques. This includes areas like reverse engineering, plant maintenance, cartography and GIS, metrology, physical simulations, etc. Sometimes, a point cloud is converted to a mesh or even to CAD geometry. However, in many applications point clouds are visualized directly, using various point attributes coming from a laser scanner and an optional camera.

OPEN CASCADE point cloud visualization solution can be used to render point clouds from small to practically unlimited size with fully interactive performance. In addition to point coordinates, it can handle such point attributes as intensity, color, normal and type ID. Visual perception is improved using Eye-Dome Lighting (EDL) algorithm. Interactive selection of point cloud fragments and individual points performed directly on GPU can be used for point cloud editing and point cloud segmentation in real-time. Also, selections results can be retrieved on a CPU side when needed.

The OPEN CASCADE point cloud rendering solution is integrated with Open CASCADE Technology 3D viewer and can be mixed with other types of 2D/3D objects in the same scene, like CAD models and meshes. The solution can be adapted to nearly any desktop CPU and GPU resources thanks to flexible memory management and level-of-detail (LOD) settings.