Instant Points: Fast Rendering of Unprocessed Point Clouds

Abstract

We present an algorithm to display enormous unprocessed point clouds at interactive rates without requiring long postprocessing. The novelty here is that we do not make any assumptions about sampling density or availability of normal vectors for the points. This is very important because such information is available only after lengthy postprocessing of scanned datasets, whereas users want to interact with the dataset immediately. Instant Points is an out-of-core algorithm that makes use of nested octrees and an enhanced version of sequential point trees.