To do this in rviz, ogre_tools::PointCloud would need to be updated to support the extra information, and the point cloud transformers would need to get updated to support normals.  My (discontinued, though someone else may pick it up) work on rve (http://www.ros.org/wiki/visualization_engine) includes support for per-point color/normal/scale, so that may be a good starting point if you're looking for rendering code.  Specifically, rve_render_server/src/batching/points*.

Josh

2011/2/2 Stéphane Magnenat <stephane.magnenat@mavt.ethz.ch>
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
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