PCL Logo Image
This post is a little bit late, but it’s better now than never! It took some really hard work to get this release out, but version 1.0 of the Point Cloud Library is finally here. Many different institutions contributed to this open source library which allows point cloud processing (with out of the box Kinect support through OpenNI!). What follows is an excerpt from the official 1.0 release announcement.

PCL is a large-scale, cross-platform, open project for point cloud processing that is free for commercial and research use. The PCL framework comprises state-of-the-art algorithms that have endless uses, such as filtering outliers from noisy data, stitching 3D point clouds together, segmenting relevant parts of a scene, extracting keypoints and creating surfaces from point clouds. With the 1.0 release, PCL is now a completely standalone library, using a few “system” dependencies (Boost, Qhull, VTK) with some extra third-party libraries (FLANN, Eigen, CMinpack, OpenNI). The release features a number of changes and updates to help you do more — and help you do it more easily. A few highlights:

  • Full Linux, Windows and Mac OSX support. If you can connect an OpenNI camera to it, PCL can run on it
  • Complete OpenNI interface for PSDK, Asus WAVI XTion and Kinect. Just hook up your camera and start hacking in 3D
  • Complete Octree interface for point cloud compression, nearest neighbor search, change detection and more
  • Lots of tutorials and demos – with more on the way

PCL 1.0 Release Announcement