News Articles

We are very proud to announce that the Point Cloud Library has been accepted for the second time in the Google Summer of Code program. This is a great opportunity to have new people joining the thriving community of open-source 3D perception.

The webpage where you will find our list of ideas We are very flexible with the project ideas, and we are accepting interesting and solid (!!!) project proposals on our official event mailing list: gsoc2012@pointclouds.org or for more direct communication on IRC: irc.oftc.net, channel #pcl.

In order to apply, please follow the instruction on the official GSoC website and our custom student application requirements.

PCL-SRCS is ready to start! The sprint will cover 3D algorithmic work for surface reconstruction and large scale mapping for PCL. Our developers are:

• Francisco Heredia and Raphael Favier, from Technical University of Eindhoven, working on Kinect Fusion extensions to large scale environments. Francisco and Raphael are long time PCL users and contributors, and we're excited to welcome them to the PCL developers team!
• Fatih Calakli, from Brown University, will be working on advanced surface reconstruction from point cloud data. Fatih is a student of Prof. Gabriel Taubin whose group has made extremely important contributions to surface reconstruction, 3D compression, and object recognition -- to name a few.
• Maksim Lukyanchenko, from National Research Nuclear University (MEPhI) Obninsk Institute for Nuclear Power Engineering, will be working on template matching using 2D + 3D from point cloud data. Maksim is a student of Prof. Alexander Velizev, a PCL veteran by now, who has already participated in the…

PCL-HRCS is ready to start! The two developers that will be working on 3D technologies for driver-assistance systems are:

• Aitor Aldoma, from Vienna University of Technology, will be working on 3D face orientation. Aitor has been working on techniques for object recognition and 6DOF pose alignment out of point cloud data for PCL in the past, such as CVFH.
• Alex Trevor, from Georgia Institute of Technology, will be working on non-ground extraction from point cloud data. Alex has developed various real-time segmentation methods for planar components as part of PCL.

We would like to thank all the other candidates for their excellent proposals! We already started following up with each of them individually, as there are many more sprints to come!

[Note: the new blogging page for HRCS will be up within the next few days at http://pointclouds.org/blog/hrcs/.]

It is our immense pleasure to announce the beginning of a new PCL Code Sprint sponsored by Sandia Robotics group: PCL-SRCS!

PCL Code Sprints are intended to rapidly advance the capabilities of the Point Cloud Library in a certain area/subject by offering stipends to talented student developers and pairing them with knowledgeable mentors for several months of accelerated software development. Projects will run for an initial period of 3 months, and all of the code produced will be BSD-licensed open source.

For this spring's PCL-Sandia Robotics Code Sprint, we have identified the following important areas for further development in PCL, and we are therefore searching for outstanding candidates (and mentors) to work on the following projects:

1. Kinect Fusion extensions to large scale environments: the purpose of this project is to extend techniques such as Kinect Fusion to larger scale environments with CUDA. A goal would be to combine it with a segmentation algorithm in order to be able to create specific object models. CUDA/GPGPU programming knowledge is…

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

PCL Code Sprints are intended to rapidly advance the capabilities of the Point Cloud Library in a certain area/subject by offering stipends to talented student developers and pairing them with knowledgeable mentors for several months of accelerated software development. Projects will run for an initial period of 3 months, and all of the code produced will be BSD-licensed open source.

For this spring's PCL-NVidia Code Sprint, we have identified the following important areas for further development in PCL, and we are therefore searching for outstanding candidates (and mentors) to work on the following projects:

1. Human Body tracking: The high-level purpose of this project is to implement and analyze various techniques for extracting humans body poses in dense 3D data at high speed with CUDA. The applications are numerous, from gaming to gesture interfacing. The code sprint component will be a focused implementation that produces fast and reusable code. Some possible code sprint project specifications…

It is our immense pleasure to announce the beginning of a new PCL Code Sprint sponsored by Honda Research Institute: PCL-HRCS!

PCL Code Sprints are intended to rapidly advance the capabilities of the Point Cloud Library in a certain area/subject by offering stipends to talented student developers and pairing them with knowledgeable mentors for several months of accelerated software development. Projects will run for an initial period of 3 months, and all of the code produced will be BSD-licensed open source.

For this spring's PCL-Honda Research Institute Code Sprint, we have identified the following important area for further development in PCL, and we are therefore searching for outstanding candidates (and mentors) to work on the following projects:

1. Non-ground extraction from point cloud data: given a point cloud data sequence, develop a method for determining a planar drivable area (i.e., identify pixels in the image that correspond to the drivable zone), then classify the remaining areas in non-drivable or unknown.
2. Face orientation: given a point…

PCL-URCS is ready to start! The integration of Urban Robotics's out-of-core octree into PCL will be performed by Stephen D. Fox, from Fordham University Robotics and Computer Vision Lab, NY. Stephen has been working on numerous projects involving laser sensors, and stereo cameras, and has been part of our community since PCL 1.0.

We would like to thank all the other candidates for their excellent proposals! We already started following up with each of them individually, as this is just our third code sprint and there are many more to come!

[Note: the new blogging page for URCS will be up within the next few days at http://pointclouds.org/blog/urcs/.]

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

PCL Code Sprints are intended to rapidly advance the capabilities of the Point Cloud Library in a certain area/subject by offering stipends to talented student developers and pairing them with knowledgeable mentors for several months of accelerated software development. These sprints have been inspired by the Google Summer Of Code (GSOC) initiative, and we will be following the same basic model. Projects will run for an initial period of 3 months with the same structure and performance evaluations as the GSOC program, and all of the code produced will be open source.

For this winter's PCL-Urban Robotics Code Sprint, we have identified the following important area for further development in PCL, and we are therefore searching for outstanding candidates (and mentors) to work on the following project:

1. Out-of-core octree integration: integrate and extend Urban Robotics's highly scalable, spatially searchable and colorized 3D octree-based point cloud format in PCL, to efficiently support the visualization and processing…

PCL-TRCS is ready to start! Due to the extreme level of interest, we have received an impressive number of great applications, and therefore have decided to bump the number of projects/slots to 8. It is therefore our pleasure to announce the dream team that will be working on TRCS for the next 3-6 months!

• Frits J. Florentinus, from Eindhoven University of Technology, will be working on automated noise filtering during TRCS. Frits has been responsible for an implementation of the classical Lu and Milios alignment implementation as well as other scan matching techniques in PCL's registration library.
• Mattia Di Gaetano, from Polytechnic University of Ancona, and Technical University of Denmark, will be working on automated noise filtering for TRCS. Mattia has been using PCL in the past, but this will be his first contribution as a developer.
• Aravindhan K Krishnan, from Arizona State University. Aravindhan has already been a PCL developer for a while now, and he will be working on automated point cloud registration during TRCS.
• Thomas…

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

PCL Code Sprints are intended to rapidly advance the capabilities of the Point Cloud Library in a certain area/subject by offering stipends to talented student developers and pairing them with knowledgeable mentors for several months of accelerated software development. These sprints have been inspired by the Google Summer Of Code (GSOC) initiative, and we will be following the same basic model. Projects will run for an initial period of 3-6 months with the same structure and performance evaluations as the GSOC program, and all of the code produced will be open source.

For this winter's PCL-Trimble Code Sprint, we have identified the following important areas for further development in PCL, and we are therefore searching for outstanding candidates (and mentors) to work on the following projects:

1. Automated decimation: automatically reduce the number of points in the point cloud based upon the definition of a feature (i.e., not a generic spatial sampling). For example reduce the number of points used to define simple surfaces, such as…