3D Pointcloud Web Portal

Description of the EUROSTARS Project: Currently many different companies provide 3d scanning equipment and services. 3d scanning is very strong for control of technical conditions and maintenance efficiency of any asset. 3D scanning technologies result in 3D point clouds, which can be converted to mesh (set of triangles) and 3D CAD-primitives. We have developed a web based portal that allows to visualize 3D CAD models. Based on requests from our customers, we would like to extend the portal to also visualize point-clouds and mesh. Such an approach has several technical challenges: 1) the number of the points captured by modern scanners are huge. The data needs to be reduced and compressed prior getting transferred over the internet. Intelligent algorithms need to determine which points need to get transferred with an increased/reduced priority, and thereby control the data transfer 2) The point-cloud/mesh cannot be converted to ordinary 3d model for further analysis. Such methods need to get developed. 3) Existing analysis methods that cross the line between point-clouds, mesh and CAD-models are not existent today, and need to get developed. In a first step, this portal will read all types of point clouds acquired by 3d scanners or photogrammetry, optimize number of points to make model light enough and the navigation responsive, and convert them to mesh and CAD-models. In a second step, we shall develop tools to perform advanced algorithms in order to analysis the data, crossing the format of point-clouds, mesh and 3d CAD models. This will also involve 4D data analysis: 3D scanning of a single object is repeated over time. The results of each scan shall be compared and deviations highlighted.