10.5281/zenodo.1051101
https://zenodo.org/records/1051101
oai:zenodo.org:1051101
Oscar Martinez-Rubi
Oscar Martinez-Rubi
Netherlands eScience Center
Stefan Verhoeven
Stefan Verhoeven
Netherlands eScience Center
Maarten van Meersbergen
Maarten van Meersbergen
Netherlands eScience Center
Markus Schutz
Markus Schutz
2Institute of Computer Graphics, Vienna University of Technology
Peter van Oosterom
Peter van Oosterom
Section GIS technology, Department OTB, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft
Romulo Goncalves
Romulo Goncalves
Netherlands eScience Center
Theo Tijssen
Theo Tijssen
Section GIS technology, Department OTB, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft
Taming the beast: Free and open-source massive point cloud web visualization
Zenodo
2015
2015-11-24
10.5281/zenodo.1051100
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Powered by WebGL, some renderers have recently become available for the visualization of point cloud data over the web, for example Plasio or Potree. We have extended Potree to be able to visualize massive point clouds and we have successfully used it with the second national Lidar survey of the Netherlands, AHN2, with 640 billion points. In addition to the visualization, the publicly available service at http://ahn2.pointclouds.nl/ also features a multi-resolution download tool, a geographic name search bar, a measurement toolkit, a 2D orientation map with field of view depiction, a demo mode and the tuning of the visualization parameters. Potree relies on reorganizing the point cloud data into an multi-resolution octree data structure. However, this reorganization is very time consuming for massive data sets. Hence, we have used a divide and conquer approach to decrease the octree creation time. To achieve such performance improvement we divided the entire space into smaller cells, generated an octree for each of them in a distributed manner and then we merged them into a single massive octree. The merging is possible because the extent of all the nodes of the octrees is known and fixed. All the developed tools are free and open-source (FOSS) and they can be used to visualize over the web other massive point clouds.