Interactive Visualization of Massive Point Clouds
"View the measured world with high-tech pointillism"
Researchers: Gerwin de Haan, Frits Post
MSc. Students: Berend Wouda,
several BSc. and MSc. positions available (and projects in the 3D Virtual Earth Minor)
Collaboration with (industrial) partners: Geo-Information technology section @ Tu Delft
Please contact us if you are interested in having your AHN-2 area visualized.
First demonstration of an interactive 3D fly-over of a city. The data is a point-cloud originating from an Aerial LIDAR scan. This particular dataset is a part of the city of Middelburg, made available in the AHN2 test data set. Colors are reconstructed from 2D Texture, so these are not the directly scanned colors.
We generate a level-of-detail data structure in OpenSceneGraph to dynamically show different densities of points, and is loading over the network. With this ~20 Million point cloud, update rates are between 15~60 fps depending on how many points are visible in a certain view. We are optimizing the datastructure to balance frame rate with visual quality. 3D Navigation is done with a SpaceMouse device.
Point Cloud visualizations have nice visual quality, especially under motion and 3D stereo, both of which are used in the VR systems in our group. Please note that these visualizations are inherently difficult for regular video compression algorithms to process without introducing disturbing visual artifacts.