CloudCompare is a 3D

point cloud Point or points may refer to: Places * Point, Lewis, a peninsula in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland * Point, Texas, a city in Rains County, Texas, United States * Point, the NE tip and a ferry terminal of Lismore, Inner Hebrides, Scotland * Point ...

processing software (such as those obtained with a

laser scanner Laser scanning is the controlled deflection of laser beams, visible or invisible. Scanned laser beams are used in some 3-D printers, in rapid prototyping, in machines for material processing, in laser engraving machines, in ophthalmological las ...

). It can also handle triangular meshes and calibrated images. Originally created during a collaboration between

Telecom ParisTech Telecom may refer to: * Telecommunications ** A telephone company (or ''telecommunications service provider'') ** The telecommunications industry * Telecom Animation Film, a Japanese studio See also * Telcom (disambiguation) * Telekom (disambi ...

and the R&D division of EDF, the CloudCompare project began in 2003 with the

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper ''Piled Higher and Deeper'' (also known as ''PhD Comics''), is a newsp ...

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

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

project and a

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

. 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 ( ICP, ...) * distance computation (cloud-cloud or cloud-mesh the nearest neighbor distance, ...) * statistics computation (spatial Chi-squared test, ...) * segmentation ( connected components labeling, front propagation based, ...) * geometric features estimation (density, curvature, roughness, geological plane orientation, ...) CloudCompare can handle unlimited

scalar field In mathematics and physics, a scalar field is a function associating a single number to every point in a space – possibly physical space. The scalar may either be a pure mathematical number ( dimensionless) or a scalar physical quantit ...

s 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

polyline In geometry, a polygonal chain is a connected series of line segments. More formally, a polygonal chain is a curve specified by a sequence of points (A_1, A_2, \dots, A_n) called its vertices. The curve itself consists of the line segments co ...

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

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

and

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

platforms, for both 32 and 64 bits architectures. It is developed in C++ with Qt.

Input/Output

CloudCompare supports input/output in the following formats: * BIN (CloudCompare own binary format) *

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

cloud (one point per line "X Y Z ...")

izard Izzard or Izard may refer to: * Izzard, an 18th-century dialectal name for the letter Z * ''Izzard'' (fanzine), a Hugo-nominated science fiction fanzine * Izard County, Arkansas * Pyrenean Chamois or izard, a species of goat-antelope __NOTOC__ Pe ...

* PLY cloud or mesh

* OBJ mesh(es) *

VTK The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) is an open-source software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing and scientific visualization.''Visualization Handbook'', Academic Press, 2005, Chapter 30: the Visualization Toolkit/ref> VTK is distribu ...

cloud or mesh * STL mesh * E57 (ASTM E2807 standard) clouds & calibrated images * LAS and LAZ clouds *

Point Cloud Library The Point Cloud Library (PCL) is an open-source library of algorithms for point cloud processing tasks and 3D geometry processing, such as occur in three-dimensional computer vision. The library contains algorithms for filtering, feature estimatio ...

PCD files *

FBX FBX (''Filmbox'') is a proprietary file format () developed by Kaydara and owned by Autodesk since 2006. It is used to provide interoperability between digital content creation applications. FBX is also part of Autodesk Gameware, a series of vid ...

mesh * SHP files * OFF mesh (Geomview) * PTX cloud (Leica) * FLS/FWS cloud(s) (Faro) * DP cloud(s) (DotProduct) * RDB / RDBX / RDS cloud(s) (Riegl) * PSZ projects (Photoscan) * Various other polyline formats Moreover, thanks to a collaboration with Pr. Irwin Scollar (creator of AirPhoto SE, a program for the geometric rectification of aerial images & orthophotos from multiple images), CloudCompare can also import Snavely's Bundler SfM software output file (.out) to generate orthorectified images (directly as image files or as 2D point clouds) and an approximated DTM (based on Bundler key-points) colored with images data. CloudCompare can also import various other formats:

Aveva AVEVA Group plc is a British multinational information technology consulting company headquartered in Cambridge, England. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. The company started as the Comput ...

PDMS PDMS may refer to: * Palm Desert Middle School, a middle school in Palm Desert, California * Plant Design Management System * Plasma desorption mass spectrometry * Point-Defence Missile System * Polydimethylsiloxane Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), ...

'.mac' scripts (''supported primitives: cylinder, plane, cone, torus, dish, box, snout and profile extrusion''), SOI (from old Mensi ''Soisic'' scanners), PN, PV, POV, ICM, etc. Eventually, CloudCompare can also export

Maya Maya may refer to: Civilizations * Maya peoples, of southern Mexico and northern Central America ** Maya civilization, the historical civilization of the Maya peoples ** Maya language, the languages of the Maya peoples * Maya (Ethiopia), a popu ...

ASCII files (MA).

Plugins

A plugin mechanism enables further extension of CloudCompare capabilities. Two kinds of plugins are available: * ''standard'' plugins for algorithms coming either from the academic world (ShadeVis, HPR, Poisson reconstruction, boolean operations on meshes, etc.) or from external libraries (

PCL PCL may refer to: Aviation *FAP Captain David Abenzur Rengifo International Airport, near Pucallpa, Peru (IATA code: PCL) *Pilot-controlled lighting, a system by which aircraft pilots can control the lighting of runways and taxiways via radio cont ...

) or others (e.g. generation of animations with ''qAnimation'') * ''OpenGL'' plugins for advanced shaders (EyeDome Lighting,Eye-Dome Lighting: a non-photorealistic shading technique
Kitware/The Source
SSAO, etc.)

Input/Output

Plugins

See also

References

External links