Rendering - color smoothing

[Yan-Koch]

When multiple stations overlap, the result appears speckled. The aim is to have an option to reduce this effect. Students from the University of Nantes started a work on it.

There would be 2 directions to discuss:

• trying to do a real time smoothing,
• applying an algorithm that would smooth the point cloud and save the tls files with the new colors. This would probably imply merging the point clouds. I think real time will be preferred, even if it's a little less qualitative.

[jo-chemla]

This smoothing operation is usually referred to as splatting and operates in fragment shader.

Potree does it nicely, the option is available under Appearance - Other - Splat Quality -> High or viewer.useHQ = true. Here is where they do it in fragment shader for potree v1.

There have been some other iterations like this reference Rendering Point Clouds with Compute Shaders and Vertex Order Optimization and this one High-Quality Surface Splatting on Today’s GPUs