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pcmerge

Merge two 3-D point clouds

Description

example

ptCloudOut = pcmerge(ptCloudA,ptCloudB,gridStep) returns a merged point cloud using a box grid filter in the region of overlap. gridStep specifies the size of the 3-D box for the filter.

Examples

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Create a point cloud with X, Y, Z points in [0, 100].

ptCloudA = pointCloud(100*rand(1000,3));

Create a partially overlapping point cloud.

ptCloudB = pointCloud([70 20 30] + 100*rand(1000,3));

Merge the two point clouds using a box filter.

ptCloudOut = pcmerge(ptCloudA, ptCloudB, 1);
pcshow(ptCloudOut);

Figure contains an axes object. The axes object contains an object of type scatter.

Input Arguments

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Point cloud A, specified as a pointCloud object.

Point cloud B, specified as a pointCloud object.

Size of 3-D box for grid filter, specified as a numeric value. Increase the size of gridStep when there are not enough resources to construct a large fine-grained grid. The function divides the space into 3-D boxes (also known as voxels), of size gridStep. It then takes an average of all points contained in each voxel. The result of the average provides a new point to represent all the points in the voxel for the merged output.

Data Types: single | double

Output Arguments

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Merged point cloud, returned as a pointCloud object. The function computes the axis-aligned bounding box for the overlapped region between two point clouds. The bounding box is divided into grid boxes of the size specified by gridStep. Points within each grid box are merged by averaging their locations, colors, and normals. Points outside the overlapped region are untouched.

Tips

  • If the two point clouds do not have the same set of properties filled, such as Color or Normal, these properties will be cleared in the returned point cloud. For example, if ptCloudA has color but ptCloudB does not, then ptCloudOut will not contain color.

  • The function filters out points with NaN or Inf values.

Extended Capabilities

C/C++ Code Generation
Generate C and C++ code using MATLAB® Coder™.

GPU Code Generation
Generate CUDA® code for NVIDIA® GPUs using GPU Coder™.

Version History

Introduced in R2015a