Efficiently Displaying Geometric Primitives Extracted from LiDAR Data Points

Abstract

The LiDAR (Laser Imaging, Detection and Ranging) system is one of the most useful data capturing tools, with high-accuracy sensors. Laser lights illuminate targets, and the system measures the distance to the target objects. The LiDAR systems can be used to obtain various kinds of geological and geometric data, including terrain surfaces, outside buildings, and others. From these LiDAR-scanned data points, we need a variety of operations, including LiDAR file format supports, point cloud manipulation features, geometric primitive extractions, reconstruction of 3D objects from the point clouds, and the efficient rendering of the point clouds and the extracted geometric primitives. We have analyzed each of those technical issues and presented practical engineering solutions. We finally integrated all the features into the system to efficiently display the geometric primitives, which are numerically extracted from the original LiDAR data points.