CloudCompare
CloudCompare is a 3D point cloud processing software. It can also handle triangular meshes and calibrated images.
Originally created during a collaboration between Telecom ParisTech and the R&D division of EDF, the CloudCompare project began in 2003 with the PhD 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 or building sites. Afterwards it evolved towards a more general and advanced 3D data processing software. It is now an independent open source project and a free software.
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
- registration
- distance computation
- statistics computation
- segmentation
- geometric features estimation
The user can interactively segment 3D entities, interactively rotate/translate one or more entities relatively to the others, interactively pick single points or couples of points or triplets of points. The latest version also supports the creation of 2D labels attached to points or rectangular areas annotations.
CloudCompare is available on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X platforms, for both 32 and 64 bits architectures. It is developed in C++ with Qt.
Input/Output
CloudCompare supports read/write in the following formats:- BIN and SBF
- ASCII cloud
- PLY cloud or mesh
- OBJ mesh
- VTK cloud or mesh
- STL mesh
- E57 clouds & calibrated images
- LAS and LAZ clouds
- Point Cloud Library PCD files
- FBX mesh
- SHP files
- OFF mesh
- PTX cloud
- FLS/FWS cloud
- DP cloud
- RDB / RDBX / RDS cloud
- PSZ projects
- Various other polyline formats
- …
Eventually, CloudCompare can also export Maya ASCII files.