Tutorials Home	Previous	Next

What is libpointmatcher about?

libpointmatcher is a library that implements the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm for alignment of point clouds. It supports both point-to-point and point-to-plane ICP. With the former, it is able to solve not only for a rigid transform, but also for a scale change between the clouds (that is, a similarity transform).

More precisely, given two point clouds, R (the reference) and S (the source), ICP tries to find the best rigid (or similarity) transform T so that T * S = R.

The Wikipedia article on ICP has more information.

libpointmatcher implements a set of filters to help denoise and subsample the input point clouds. It supports a variety of file types and it can be configured via both YAML files and an in-memory API.

libpointmatcher is written in C++.