[ArcheOS] CloudCompare - 3D point cloud and mesh processing software

[Ricardo Gaidão]

CloudCompare is licensed under under LGPL and GPL terms and according to the official site:

"CloudCompare is a 3D point cloud (and triangular mesh) processing
  software.
It has been originally designed to perform comparison 
between two 3D points clouds
(such as the ones obtained with a laser 
scanner) or between a point cloud and a
triangular mesh. It relies on a specific 
octree structure that enables great performances

in this particular function. It was also meant to deal with huge point clouds
(typically more than 10 millions points, and up to 120 millions with 2 Gb of
memory)."

http://www.danielgm.net/cc/


The last version includes features like:

-> Point cloud capture with a Microsfot Kinect device (qKinnect - based on libfreenect).

-> 3D surface reconstruction with 'Poisson Surface Reconstruction ' algorithm by Kazhdan et al. 

-> Real time OpenGL shading filters SSAO & EyeDome Lighting available as plugins.


It also can import Bundler files and generate orthophotos from them, and has been 

successfully used in aerial archeology studies.

check:

http://www.danielgm.net/cc/doc/wiki/index.php5?title=AirPhotoSE

and

http://www.uni-koeln.de/~al001/airphotose_files/hs1500.htm

Meshlab offers a larger number of processing tools, but CloudCompare maybe 

worth to be checked, to find out if eventually brings some features, not present in
Meshlab, or eventually better performances in some tools also present in the last.