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Hauptverfasser: Erler, Philipp, Herzberger, Lukas, Wimmer, Michael, Schütz, Markus
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20198
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author Erler, Philipp
Herzberger, Lukas
Wimmer, Michael
Schütz, Markus
author_facet Erler, Philipp
Herzberger, Lukas
Wimmer, Michael
Schütz, Markus
contents Large-scale terrain scans are the basis for many important tasks, such as topographic mapping, forestry, agriculture, and infrastructure planning. The resulting point cloud data sets are so massive in size that even basic tasks like viewing take hours to days of pre-processing in order to create level-of-detail structures that allow inspecting the data set in their entirety in real time. In this paper, we propose a method that is capable of instantly visualizing massive country-sized scans with hundreds of billions of points. Upon opening the data set, we first load a sparse subsample of points and initialize an overview of the entire point cloud, immediately followed by a surface reconstruction process to generate higher-quality, hole-free heightmaps. As users start navigating towards a region of interest, we continue to prioritize the heightmap construction process to the user's viewpoint. Once a user zooms in closely, we load the full-resolution point cloud data for that region and update the corresponding height map textures with the full-resolution data. As users navigate elsewhere, full-resolution point data that is no longer needed is unloaded, but the updated heightmap textures are retained as a form of medium level of detail. Overall, our method constitutes a form of direct out-of-core rendering for massive point cloud data sets (terabytes, compressed) that requires no preprocessing and no additional disk space. Source code, executable, pre-trained model, and dataset are available at: https://github.com/cg-tuwien/lidarscout
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_20198
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LidarScout: Direct Out-of-Core Rendering of Massive Point Clouds
Erler, Philipp
Herzberger, Lukas
Wimmer, Michael
Schütz, Markus
Graphics
Large-scale terrain scans are the basis for many important tasks, such as topographic mapping, forestry, agriculture, and infrastructure planning. The resulting point cloud data sets are so massive in size that even basic tasks like viewing take hours to days of pre-processing in order to create level-of-detail structures that allow inspecting the data set in their entirety in real time. In this paper, we propose a method that is capable of instantly visualizing massive country-sized scans with hundreds of billions of points. Upon opening the data set, we first load a sparse subsample of points and initialize an overview of the entire point cloud, immediately followed by a surface reconstruction process to generate higher-quality, hole-free heightmaps. As users start navigating towards a region of interest, we continue to prioritize the heightmap construction process to the user's viewpoint. Once a user zooms in closely, we load the full-resolution point cloud data for that region and update the corresponding height map textures with the full-resolution data. As users navigate elsewhere, full-resolution point data that is no longer needed is unloaded, but the updated heightmap textures are retained as a form of medium level of detail. Overall, our method constitutes a form of direct out-of-core rendering for massive point cloud data sets (terabytes, compressed) that requires no preprocessing and no additional disk space. Source code, executable, pre-trained model, and dataset are available at: https://github.com/cg-tuwien/lidarscout
title LidarScout: Direct Out-of-Core Rendering of Massive Point Clouds
topic Graphics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20198