Introduction

This page will introduce the general concept of point clouds and illustrate the capabilities of pyntcloud as a point cloud processing tool.

Point clouds

Point clouds are one of the most relevant entities for representing three dimensional data these days, along with polygonal meshes (which are just a special case of point clouds with connectivity graph attached).

In its simplest form, a point cloud is a set of points in a cartesian coordinate system.

Accurate 3D point clouds can nowadays be (easily and cheaply) acquired from different sources. For example:

pyntcloud

pyntcloud enables simple and interactive exploration of point cloud data, regardless of which sensor was used to generate it or what the use case is.

Although it was built for being used on Jupyter Notebooks, the library is suitable for other kinds of uses.

pyntcloud is composed of several modules (as independent as possible) that englobe common point cloud processing operations:

Most of the functionality of this modules can be accessed by the core class of the library, PyntCloud, and its corresponding methods:

from pyntcloud import PyntCloud
# io
cloud = PyntCloud.from_file("some_file.ply")
# structures
kdtree_id = cloud.add_structure("kdtree")
# neighbors
k_neighbors = cloud.get_neighbors(k=5, kdtree=kdtree_id)
# scalar_fields
ev = cloud.add_scalar_field("eigen_values", k_neighbors=k_neighbors)
# filters
f = cloud.get_filter("BBOX", min_x=0.1, max_x=0.8)
# ...

Although most of the functionality in the modules can be used without constructing a PyntCloud instance, the recommended workflow for the average user is the one showcased above.