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We are very happy to announce that we are releasing the 1.6 version of our favorite library. This release took longer than the usual due to the very busy schedule of the PCL community: code sprints, tutorials at robotics and computer vision conferences, contests, the Open Perception Foundation etc.

Due to the larger time difference to the previous release, the Point Cloud Library 1.6 contains a lot more new features, bug fixes, and awesome tools and apps you can take advantage of in your personal projects. More details on the change list.

As usual, you will find binaries for Windows, Debian&Ubuntu, and Mac OS X on the downloads page. or source code that you can compile for your favorite supported platform.

Thank you for the awesome support you have offered us so far!

After just a couple of weeks from the official launch, we are happy to announce that the Open Perception organization is sponsoring its first ever PCL Code Sprint. And because we are seriously standing by our commitment to make PCL truly cross-platform, this code sprint is very different than what we're used to: Fix PCL on Mac! What this means is that the lucky participant(s), besides fame and glory, will be receiving financial support through our already established code sprint pipeline, for working on improving the usability of PCL on OS X, and tackling several important issues, such as:

• clean builds on OS X 10.6+, using different compilers: XCode 4.3+, GCC 4.2+, Clang
• different methodologies for installing our dependencies (Boost, VTK, etc): source compiles vs prebuilt binaries (e.g., DMGs)
• Cocoa vs X11 for QVTK (Qt+VTK)
• analysis and scripts for MacPorts, Homebrew, Fink, CMake/SuperBuild
• installation locations: /opt/local, /usr/local, user defined
• offer support for Mac builds on our build farm, managed with TeamCity and CDash

Over the weekend, in overflowing rooms at the Point Cloud Processing workshop and PCL tutorial at CVPR 2012, Willow Garage proudly announced the creation of Open Perception, Inc. (OP), an independent non-profit foundation, focused on advancing the development and adoption of open source software for 2D and 3D processing of sensory data. For more details about the announcement, please see the official press release.

Open Perception is founded by a global community of researchers and engineers for the benefit of the industrial and research 3D perception communities. The Point Cloud Library (PCL) project represents Open Perception's most important work to date consisting of a large scale, BSD-licensed open project for 3D point cloud processing.

The foundation is set up to receive donations and sponsorship from anyone, and will concentrate on paying developers in the community, giving students travel grants and stipends, organizing open source events, and supporting its projects, such as…

The PCL plugin for ParaView, developed by Kitware, Inc., allows users to access algorithms from the Point Cloud Processing Library (PCL) within ParaView. ParaView is an open-source, multi-platform data analysis and visualization framework. The plugin also provides Python bindings for the filters using VTK's python wrapping, thus enabling fast prototyping and integration with NumPy and SciPy. With point cloud data loaded in ParaView, users can interactively apply PCL algorithms, color the point clouds by different attributes, and compose complex processing pipelines to explore the point cloud data.

The PCL plugin for ParaView will be presented during the demo sessions of the International Workshop on Point Cloud Processing and the PCL tutorial at CVPR 2012 in Providence, RI (Saturday, June 16, 4.55pm - 6.30pm and Sunday, June 17, from 4:30pm).

(PCL is a proud sponsor of CVPR 2012.)

It is our immense pleasure to announce the beginning of a new PCL Code Sprint sponsored by DINAST: PCL-DINCS!

DINAST, a short range 3D sensor manufacturer known for their IPA infrared cameras, is looking for talented developers that are willing to contribute to two areas in PCL:

1. a pcl::Grabber camera driver interface for DINAST cameras (standalone BSD open source C++ driver code already available);
2. a technology demonstrator for real-time 3D collision mapping (e.g., using octree structures) used for motion planning with a mobile manipulator, using multiple IPA 3D cameras.

PCL-DINCS will run for 1.5 months during this summer. The student developer will receive a stipend of $1500 and several IPA 3D cameras. Potential candidates should submit the following information to jobs@pointclouds.org:

• a brief resume
• a list of existing PCL contributions (if any)
• a list of projects (emphasis on open source projects please) that they contributed to in the past

This project requires good…

The mobile revolution is upon us! Who says mobile platforms are only good for email and Facebook? Why not 3-D perception and scientific visualization? Today's phones and tablets ship with multi-core CPUs, gigabytes of RAM, and more pixels than you can see. If you want to run Point Cloud Library on your iPhone, then who's to stop you? Mobile is here.

The Point Cloud Library community, Willow Garage, NVidia and Kitware are pleased to announce their collaboration to bring point cloud visualization to the mobile domain. You don't have to stop at visualization either; why not run a couple of PCL filters on your device while you're at it? Development sponsored by the NVidia Code Sprint has brought examples of point cloud streaming mobile clients, apps that read PCD files and execute PCL filters, and point cloud visualizations with millions of points.

We have used all the 11 slots that Google allocated to our organization, gathering a veritable dream-team of researchers and coders from all over the world:

• Kripasindhu Sarkar from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur is a senior undergraduate who is going to work on 2D Image Drawing Operators from VTK in PCL, under the supervision of:
  • Marcus Hanwell
  • Pat Marion
• Yangyan Li, PhD student from the Visual Computing Research Center(VCC), Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology(SIAT), Chinese Academy of Sciences is tackling a project he proposed himself, called ScanModeler: a Point Cloud based Reconstruction Platform, being helped out by:
  • Stefan Holzer
  • Federico Tombari
• Changhyun Choi is a graduate student from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, and will be developing algorithms for 3D edge extraction from an organized point cloud, mentored by:
  • Alex Trevor
• Gioia Ballin recently graduated magna cum laude her MSc from University of Padua, Italy, and proposed to work on Additional functionalities and improvements for PCL modules, such as new feature descriptors and increments to the recognition…

We are proud to announce that the first ever PCL code sprint has recently ended, with the submission of the final reports.

• Alexandru-Eugen Ichim, from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, has worked on surface reconstruction and point cloud smoothing.
• Maurice Fallon and Hordur Johannsson, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, have worked on real-time global point cloud localization.

More details about what they have contributed with during this period, and the final reports can be found on the TOCS developer's blog: http://pointclouds.org/blog/tocs/.

We are now…

There are several tools available in PCL trunk that may be useful to the upcoming mobile manipulation challenge. Tools for segmentation of organized point cloud data (as from a Kinect or Xtion) have been added in pcl::OrganizedConnectedComponentSegmentation and pcl::OrganizedMultiPlaneSegmentation. These can be used for fast segmentation of all planes in the scene or euclidean clustering. It can also be extended with your own comparison functions for other segmentation tasks.

An example of how to use the plane segmentation is:

// Segment planes
pcl::OrganizedMultiPlaneSegmentation< PointT, pcl::Normal, pcl::Label > mps;
mps.setMinInliers (10000);
mps.setAngularThreshold (0.017453 * 2.0); // 2 degrees
mps.setDistanceThreshold (0.02); // 2cm
mps.setInputNormals (normal_cloud);
mps.setInputCloud (cloud);
std::vector< pcl::PlanarRegion< PointT > > regions;
mps.segmentAndRefine (regions);

for (size_t i = 0; i < regions.size (); i++)
{
  Eigen::Vector3f centroid = regions[i].getCentroid ();
  Eigen::Vector4f model = regions[i].getCoefficients ();
  pcl::PointCloud boundary_cloud;
  boundary_cloud.points = regions[i].getContour ();
  printf ("Centroid: (%f, %f, %f)\n  Coefficients:…

PCL-NVCS is ready to start! The sprint will cover 3D algorithmic work for human body recognition, deformable object modeling, and real-time visualization on Tegra3 platforms. Here's a list of the PCL developers working on the sprint:

• Pat Marion, a member of the scientific visualization group at Kitware, will be working on point cloud streaming to Tegra3 devices for mobile visualization. Pat brings in years of experience by having had worked on large 3D visualization engines such as VTK, ParaView, and VES.
• Koen Buys from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, will be working on human body tracking from point cloud data. Koen is already a PCL developer and has been working on body tracking using GPUs as part of his doctoral research.
• Martin Saelzle from Technische Universitaet Muenchen, will be working on deformable object modeling for PCL. Martin acquired extensive experience in point cloud registration using Kinect sensors while working in Prof. Nassir Navab's group at TUM.

We would like to thank all the other candidates for their excellent proposals! We already started…