[ros-users] [PCL-users] PCL 0.7 Released!

[Radu Bogdan Rusu]

On 12/21/2010 12:37 AM, Marius Muja wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> We are happy to announce the release of PCL 0.7

And just to continue with our goofy add-hoc release naming scheme (post 0.5), let's call this one: Special "FLANN is 
awesome" edition, as we attribute most of the algorithmic speedups to Marius! :)


One more note: we also released perception_pcl_addons 0.2 (http://www.ros.org/wiki/perception_pcl_addons/ChangeList) 
which brings a lot of internal optimizations for speed + some new functionality to all the PCL Visualizer users.


The next target is 0.8, and we'll start changing things a bit... one one hand we'll try to do a website organization 
with a proper wish list, bugs to fix, etc, so that more people can contribute, and on the other, we'll start dropping 
support for deprecated/unused classes/methods and prepare for the API review.

One of the first things that we need to deprecate is the pcl_ros::Publisher/Subscriber. Thanks to Patrick's amazing 
work, we now have the possibility to reuse the ros::Publisher/Subscriber for pcl::PointCloud<T> datasets. This means:
  * within the same process, we will just copy the pcl::PointCloud<T>::ConstPtr
  * between different processes, we will send the pcl::PointCloud<T>::ConstPtr, but with the same MD5 sum as 
sensor_msgs::PointCloud2 + extra logic, which means all sensor_msgs/PointCloud2 consumers will be able to consume 
pcl::PointCloud<T> directly


Also many many thanks to Troy for pushing the new library structure (99% done, still some work to do for 0.8), which 
improves things dramatically for user code compiled against PCL. Between 0.5 and 0.7 we managed to drop the memory usage 
during compilation from 1.3GB to ~650MB / process, which is FANTASTIC! The remaining work includes refactoring some of 
the internal ROS dependencies such as message_filters, or dynamic_reconfigure, which might take some time.


And as Marius said, many many thanks to all the contributors and users! I'm sure we forgot some names, but they know who 
they are!


Cheers,
Radu.
--
http://pointclouds.org