Simple 3D viewer in LabVIEW based on PCL (point cloud library) visualization

[Klemen]

Hello,

in the past I have been trying to understand the Labview 3d picture control, but gave it up. To display a 3D point cloud, the Labview 3d picture control is in my opinion so complex and user unfriendly. Since Labview introduced the stereo vision library (in 2012 I think), I thought that they would also put some effort in 3D display of the acquired spatial data. This is not the case, since NI's stereo vision examples include only the display of the depth image and the 3D representation is left out. Eventhough the depth image carries the main "information" of 3D measurements (the distance from the measuring device - camera), it is often more practical to visulize the measured data in 3D space, maybe also with the texture if supported.

For this reason, I have built a dll, which enables simple viewing of the 3D data using the PCL visualization library.  The dll takes the inputs (X,Y,Z) and RGBA (where A stands for alpha channel) and displays the 3D point cloud as shown in the image below:

The reason, the texture is gray is that I used the same values for all three channels (R, G and B). You can of course display point cloud with RGB texture. For now the viewer displays only points, but in the future I intend to upgrade the display, so that it can also show triangulated points (surfaces). This can also be achieved using PCL.

I am also attaching a dll and a Labview example program. The dll was built with PCL 1.6.0 and VS2010 x86.

Be creative.

Best regards,

K