CloudCompare - Open Source project

• 3D point cloud and mesh processing software

CloudCompare - Wikipedia

• CloudCompare is a 3D point cloud processing software (such as those obtained with a ). It can also handle triangular meshes and calibrated images.
• Originally created during a collaboration between  and the R&D division of , the CloudCompare project began in 2003 with the  of Daniel Girardeau-Montaut on Change detection on 3D geometric data. At that time, its main purpose was to quickly detect changes in 3D high density point clouds acquired with laser scanners in industrial facilities (such as power plants) or building sites. Afterwards it evolved towards a more general and advanced 3D data processing software. It is now an independent  project and a .
• CloudCompare provides a set of basic tools for manually editing and rendering 3D points clouds and triangular meshes. It also offers various advanced processing algorithms, among which methods for performing:
  • projections (axis-based, cylinder or a cone unrolling, ...)
  • registration (, ...)
  • distance computation (cloud-cloud or cloud-mesh , ...)
  • statistics computation (spatial  test, ...)
  • segmentation (, front propagation based, ...)
  • geometric features estimation (density, curvature, roughness, , ...)
• CloudCompare can handle unlimited  per point cloud on which various dedicated algorithms can be applied (smoothing, gradient evaluation, statistics, etc.). A dynamic color rendering system helps the user to visualize per-point scalar fields in an efficient way. Therefore, CloudCompare can also be used to visualize N-D data.
• The user can interactively segment 3D entities (with a 2D  drawn on screen), interactively rotate/translate one or more entities relatively to the others, interactively pick single points or couples of points (to get the corresponding segment length) or triplets of points (to get the corresponding angle and plane normal). The latest version also supports the creation of 2D labels attached to points or rectangular areas annotations.
• CloudCompare is available on ,  and  platforms, for both 32 and 64 bits architectures. It is developed in C++ with .