point cloud support and/or helpers

[ahundt]

Possible forms point cloud support could come in:

• no dependency, but add helper functions that will assist any library with point clouds
  • examples include opencv_contrib, libpointmatcher, boost.geometry
• providing an optional dependency and conversion header for desired libraries

There are a few disparate places where this is being worked on with PCL specifically: pcl pull request giacomodabisias/libfreenect2pclgrabber ahundt/libfreenect2pclgrabber (fork)

@giacomodabisias may be interested in this discussion

[floe]

We already have a lot of issues with the absolutely unavoidable dependencies (OpenGL, OpenCL, libusb), so I'd avoid going that route. Regarding helper functions, there is Registration::getPointXYZRGB (http://openkinect.github.io/libfreenect2/classlibfreenect2_1_1Registration.html#a145c5d0d475a688f4c36ec35b1ac4974), is that what you have in mind?

[giacomodabisias]

Yeah, I would also avoid that for now and maintain things separate

[xlz]

I agree we can add more helpers or variants of Registration::getPointXYZRGB to make it easier to export to PCL.

Also, I plan for a data recorder which saves data in PCLZF format and can be imported to PCL with its own interfaces/tools.

None of these need extra dependency.

The pclgrabber is interesting. I think the purpose of that is mostly realtime pointcloud visualization. That is best done on the PCL side.

[hanyazou]

JFYI: I wrote my OpeNI2 driver to use libfreenect2 with PCL. (the pull request is https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect2/pull/518) You can grab point could data from Kinect to PCL because PCL have OpenNI2 grabber already. Pcl_openni2_viewer application in the PCL is a sample realtime point cloud viewer.