Meshing of Point Clouds from a 3Dlaser scanner

Question

Is there any package/software which can do Meshing of Point Clouds in real time?

What is the data structure used to represent 3D Point Clouds ?

Answer 1

MeshLab http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/

Answer 2

MeshLab is a great one for meshing point clouds.

Look under Filters > Re-meshing, simplification and reconstruction. Ball Pivoting Surface Reconstruction and Poisson Reconstruction are good ones.

Here you can find a tutorial on Meshing Point Clouds using MeshLab.

As for representing your point cloud the easiest format to use is the XYZ format:

X1 Y1 Z1
X2 Y2 Z2
etc.

Another good format that is relatively easy to use is Object (OBJ) model format.

Answer 3

Marc Levoy's website contains links to packages used to create several famous 3D models, but they are not real time. In particular, VripPack and ZipPack. He has some papers on doing it in real time too, I think, but they lack packaged implementations.