3D point cloud rendering is an efficient way to represent 3D scenes. For
forest ecologists, 3D point cloud models are also useful for measuring
attributes of forest canopy structure and color at the scale of individual
tree crowns. Rendering forest point clouds in the web browser may also help
scientists cooperate and use data efficiently. The main problem of point
cloud rendering is it lacks details without an extremely dense cloud, which
may not be easy to acquire. Our approach is to render point clouds
constructed by computer vision structure-from-motion feature matching and
using textures from the feature points in the original images. These textures
are rendered on patches, oriented to match the original camera orientation.
User study shows this method provides more details and can help ecologists
with their research.