Point Cloud Library


The Point Cloud Library 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 feature estimation, surface reconstruction, 3D registration, model fitting, and segmentation. It is written in C++ and released under the BSD license.
These algorithms have been used, for example, for perception in robotics to filter outliers from noisy data, stitch 3D point clouds together, segment relevant parts of a scene, extract keypoints and compute descriptors to recognize objects in the world based on their geometric appearance, and create surfaces from point clouds and visualize them.

PCD File Format

To be able to store various data formats, the pcd file format was created. It allows to use data types with dynamic field and
data descriptors to be stored in binary or ascii form.

History

The development of the Point Cloud Library started in March 2010 at Willow Garage. The project initially resided on a sub domain of Willow Garage then moved to a new website www.pointclouds.org in March 2011. PCL's first official release was released two months later in May 2011.

Modules

PCL is split into a number of modular libraries.