Any good C or C++ libraries out there for dealing with large point clouds? [closed]

Question

Basically, I'm looking for a library or SDK for handling large point clouds coming from LIDAR or scanners, typically running into many millions of points of X,Y,Z,Colour. What I'm after are as follows;

Fast display, zooming, panning Point cloud registration Fast low level access to the data Regression of surfaces and solids (not as important as the others)

While I don't mind paying for a reasonable commercial library, I'm not interested in a very expensive library (e.g. in excess of about $5k) or one with a per user run-time license cost. Open source would also be good. I found a few possibilities via google, but they all tend to be too expensive for my budget.

Answer 1

Check Point Cloud Library (PCL). It is quite a complete toolkit for processing and manipulating point clouds. It also provides tools for point clouds visualisation: pcl::visualization::CloudViewer which makes use of VTK library and wxWidgets

Since 2011, point clout translation (read/write) and manipulating toolkit has been developed: PDAL - Point Data Abstraction Library