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PCL Toolkit (C++)

  • The Point Cloud Library (PCL) is a standalone, large scale, open project for 2D/3D image and point cloud processing. PCL is released under the terms of the BSD license, and thus free for commercial and research use.
  • It offers multiple advanced algorithms, written in C++ for efficiency, while offering a C++ and Python (while not giving access to all functions) interfaces.

Documentation and tutorials

Toolkit

  • The toolkit is available under following zip file.
  • For SPL members, repo is under here.
  • It contains multiple templated functions implementing PCL algorithms with simpler calls, offering a faster way for further development.
  • To run it, you need to have PCL installed. Please refer to their documentation for this (install from precompiled binaries or build it from source).

Pipeline principle

  • The basic objective of this toolkit was to implement multiple techniques allowing to align clouds, knowing or not approximate position thanks to odometry, with or without a fixed reference that could be used for positioning the scans ...
  • The idea is to go through a "pipeline", a recipe that allow both clouds to be quickly aligned with enough precision.
  • It is as follow :

    Registration pipeline
    Figure 1: Registration pipeline

  • The chosen pipeline is the one presented in "An efficient development of 3D surface registration by Point Cloud Library (PCL)" by Cheng-Tiao Hsieh.

Other interesting papers can be found :