Point Cloud Manager

Abstract

Recent advances in acquisition technologies, such as LIDAR and photogrammetry, have brought back to popularity 3D point clouds in a lot of fields of application of Computer Graphics: Civil Engineering, Architecture, Topography, etc. These acquisition systems are producing an unprecedented amount of geometric data with additional attached information, resulting in huge datasets whose processing and storage requirements exceed usual approaches, presenting new challenges that can be addressed from a Big Data perspective by applying High Performance Computing and Computer Graphics techniques. This chapter presents a series of applications built on top of Point Cloud Manager (PCM), a middleware that provides an abstraction for point clouds with arbitrary attached data and makes it easy to perform out-of-core operations on them on commodity CPUs and GPUs. Hence, different kinds of real world applications are tackled, showing both real-time and offline examples, and render-oriented and computation-related operations as well.