13 - 18 OCTOBER 2013, ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA

Rendering Point Clouds with Feature Textures

Contributors: 
Yuping Zhang, Marc Olano, Jonathan P. Dandois, Jian Chen
Description
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.