Hello,

In the continuation of our work with the kinect, we are interested at 
looking into combining multiple scans using surfels. Surfels [1] are 
oriented surface elements (point+normal+radius), and typically hold 
color information and view statistics, to provide intelligence to the 
update process. Recent works [2,3] tend to indicate that surfels are 
well-suited for RGB-D sensors such as the kinect.

We are interested in adding surfel support to rviz/ros. To that end, it 
would be nice to agree on a naming convention for surfels, maybe to add 
a corresponding type to pcl/point_types.hpp, and to add support in rviz.

Are there other people around interested in surfels? Are there some best 
practice on how to extend the PointCloud(2) support in rviz?

Thank you, kind regards,

Stéphane


[1] Pfister et al., Surfels: surface elements as rendering primitives
http://www.cg.inf.ethz.ch/Downloads/Publications/Papers/2000/p_Pfi00.pdf

[2] T Weise et al., In-hand Scanning with Online Loop Closure
http://www.mmp.rwth-aachen.de/publications/pdf/weise-onlineloopclosure-3dim09.pdf

[3] Henry et al. - RGB-D Mapping: Using Depth Cameras for Dense 3D 
Modeling of Indoor Environments
http://www.seattle.intel-research.net/RGBD/RGBD-RSS2010/papers/henry-RGBD10-RGBD-mapping.pdf

-- 
Dr Stéphane Magnenat
http://stephane.magnenat.net