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Author Topic: Export point clouds to PCD format  (Read 4205 times)

stephan

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Export point clouds to PCD format
« on: August 19, 2019, 06:36:05 PM »
Hi all,

It would be useful to be able to export the dense and sparse PCs to PCD format directly from photoscan. PCD is becoming a standard used by many people so I think it would be helpful for a lot of people.

Cheers,

Alexey Pasumansky

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Re: Export point clouds to PCD format
« Reply #1 on: August 19, 2019, 06:44:56 PM »
Hello stephan,

Can you provide any reference to PCD format?
Best regards,
Alexey Pasumansky,
Agisoft LLC

stephan

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Re: Export point clouds to PCD format
« Reply #2 on: August 20, 2019, 11:06:58 AM »
Hi Alexey,

Yes, you can find the documentation here:
http://pointclouds.org/documentation/tutorials/pcd_file_format.php

There is also an exaplanation there as to how this file format came to exist. It was created specifically by the PCL library people to be faster and more flexible than other point cloud formats, and is being adopted as a standard and used for example by http://www.open3d.org/

Cheers,
Stephan

Alexey Pasumansky

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Re: Export point clouds to PCD format
« Reply #3 on: August 22, 2019, 03:11:12 PM »
Hello Stephan,

Thank you for sharing the links. We'll try to implement the support for this format in version 1.6.0 (Pre-release).
Best regards,
Alexey Pasumansky,
Agisoft LLC

JRM

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Re: Export point clouds to PCD format
« Reply #4 on: August 23, 2019, 11:34:45 AM »
for info, PCD is now supported in the 2.0 release of the PDAL lib

stephan

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Re: Export point clouds to PCD format
« Reply #5 on: August 27, 2019, 02:59:50 PM »
Hello Stephan,

Thank you for sharing the links. We'll try to implement the support for this format in version 1.6.0 (Pre-release).

Awesome, thanks!

stephan

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Re: Export point clouds to PCD format
« Reply #6 on: September 23, 2019, 05:42:50 PM »
Thanks for including this, much appreciated!

Alexey Pasumansky

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Re: Export point clouds to PCD format
« Reply #7 on: September 23, 2019, 05:55:15 PM »
Hello stephan,

Have you already got a chance to check the compatibility of PCD format exported from Metashape 1.6 with the post-processing analysis tools?
Best regards,
Alexey Pasumansky,
Agisoft LLC

stephan

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Re: Export point clouds to PCD format
« Reply #8 on: September 26, 2019, 12:35:41 PM »
Hi Alexey,

I have exported a set of PCD files and I will test ASAP. I had to roll back to 1.5.5 for my main work however because I hit some bugs in the python API.
Let me do some tests with the PCD files and report back.

Cheers,

stephan

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Re: Export point clouds to PCD format
« Reply #9 on: September 26, 2019, 12:51:51 PM »
Opening the PCD files in Open3D works perfectly, thanks!

In my tests however it seems that color information is preserved in Open3D when I export the point clouds in PCD binary format, but not when exporting in PCD "standard" format. This might be an error with exporting on my side though but I have removed 1.6 right now because I am rendering on 1.5.5
If you'd like me to check again please send me a PCD file with color info in non-binary format via DM and I will test it ;)

Cheers,
Stephan