Out-of-core selection and editing of huge point clouds

In this paper we present an out-of-core editing system for point clouds, which allows selecting and modifying arbitrary parts of a huge point cloud interactively. We can use the selections to segment the point cloud, to delete points, or to render a preview of the model without the points in the selections. Furthermore we allow for inserting points into an already existing point cloud. All operations are conducted on a rendering optimized data structure that uses the raw point cloud from a laser scanner, and no additionally created points are needed for an efficient level-of-detail (LOD) representation using this data structure. We also propose an algorithm to alleviate the artifacts when rendering a point cloud with large discrepancies in density in different areas by estimating point sizes heuristically. These estimated point sizes can be used to mimic a closed surface on the raw point cloud, also when the point cloud is composed of several raw laser scans.