How do I visualize a camera position and orientation in Meshlab?

Question

I have a point cloud together with a set of camera positions from which the cloud was generated. I understand that I can specify the point cloud using the .ply file format, and visualize the point cloud in Meshlab.

I would like to visualize the camera position and orientation relative to the point cloud. My question is, how do I visualize the orientation and position in MeshLab?

Answer 1

In MeshLab you can handle the camera in a very simple way: ctrl+c and ctrl+v copy and paste the current camera position inside the active viewport.

Interestingly enough this process is performed using a simple XML text format, so, after a ctrl+c inside MeshLab, you can paste the camera position inside any text editor, modify it, and then copy/paste it back into MeshLab.

<!DOCTYPE ViewState>
<project>
 <VCGCamera PixelSizeMm="0.0369161 0.0369161" 
            RotationMatrix="0.842785 -0.3654 0.395215 0 0.0950694 0.823772 0.558894 0 -0.529787 -0.433455 0.729001 0 0 0 0 1 " 
            TranslationVector="1.51388 1.23855 -2.08312 1" 
            FocalMm="24.5532" 
            ViewportPx="979 768" 
            CenterPx="489 384" 
            LensDistortion="0 0" CameraType="0"/>
 <ViewSettings TrackScale="1.06075" 
               NearPlane="0.909327" FarPlane="7.11778"/>
</project>