pcdio

中文

What is pcdio?

pcdio is a header-only library for reading and writing PCD files without any dependencies except for the standard library.

It's code comes from PCL 1.14.1 IO module with some modifications which removes the dependency on Boost, Eigen and other PCL modules.

pcdio acts same as PCL IO module (just re-organize PCL code):

• supports the PCD formats version up to V0.7
• supports ascii, binary, binary_compressed
• use same pcl namespace and api
• use pcl::PCLPointCloud2 to represent the point cloud

pcdio has been tested on Ubuntu 20.04 x86_64, it should work on other platforms.

Why create this?

First of all, PCL PCD format is good engouth and widely used (e.g. LiDAR SLAM and Autonomous driving). But PCL is a heavy library which has losts of denpendencies and we cannot install single module.

How I make it?

• merge code into one sinle header file
• replace pcl exception with std exception
• add custom Vector4f and Quaternionf to remove Eigen dependency
• add some code to remove Boost dependency
  • implement iequals , trim, IsBigEndian
  • give up the file lock feature (may cause problem)

How to use it?

demo.cpp is a demo to show how to use it. The demo does:

1. read .pcd file
2. print the meta info
3. save loaded pointcloud to new.pcd (ascii, default precision)
4. convert the loaded pointcloud to custom pointcloud data structure(KITTI BIN format) and save to KITTI bin file

$ gcc demo.cpp -I ./ -o demo -lstdc++
# get exe file: demo
$ ./demo ./data/xyzit_binary_compressed.pcd 
# print meta info
# get new.pcd 
# get kitti.bin
$ md5sum new.pcd ./data/xyzit_ascii_precision_8.pcd 
c104bfd8c0abfb5619a833d823dc5db2  new.pcd
c104bfd8c0abfb5619a833d823dc5db2  ./data/xyzit_ascii_precision_8.pcd

Just care about three things:

• pcl::PCLPointCloud2 : a container for storing point cloud data
• pcl::io::loadPCDFile() : load pcd file
• pcl::io::savePCDFile() : save pcd file

if you want to allow it print log, please define PCDIO_ENABLE_CONSOLE_LOG macro before include pcdio/pcdio.h

How to use my custom pointcloud data structure?

pcl::PCLPointCloud2 is the structure to present the pointcloud from PCD file. Unfortunately, we do not provide an easy way like PCL lib to convert between pcl::PCLPointCloud2 and pcl::PointCloud<PointT> which support to register custom point type. We have to implement the convert function by ourselves. In the demo.cpp we show the example to use KITTI point type, you can refer the two function:

• bool FromPCLPointCloud2(const pcl::PCLPointCloud2& pc2, KittiPointCloud& pointcloud) : read pcd file and use this to convert pcl::PCLPointCloud2 to your own data
• bool ToPCLPointCloud2(const KittiPointCloud& pointcloud, pcl::PCLPointCloud2& pc2) : use this to convert you own pointcloud data to pcl::PCLPointCloud2 and then save as pcd file

TODO

• provide easy way to convert pcl::PCLPointCloud2 to custom data structure, like use pcl::PointCloud<PointT>