PCL(Point Cloud Library) is a large cross-platform open source C++ programming library based on the previous research on point cloud. A large number of general algorithms and efficient data structures related to point clouds are realized, which involve point cloud acquisition, filtering, segmentation, registration, retrieval, feature extraction, recognition, tracking, surface reconstruction, visualization and so on.

It supports various operating system platforms and can run on Windows, Linux, Android, Mac OS X and some embedded real-time systems. If OpenCV is the crystallization of 2D information acquisition and processing, PCL has the same position in the field of 3D information acquisition and processing. PCL is a BSD authorization method, which can be used for commercial and academic applications free of charge.

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PCL adopts advanced high-performance computing technologies such as OpenMP, GPU and CUDA to improve the real-time performance of the program through parallelization. The framework of K nearest neighbor search operation is based on Flann (approximate nearest neighbor fast library), and its speed is also the fastest in the current technology.

All modules and algorithms in PCL transmit data through Boost*** shared pointers, thus avoiding copying the existing data in the system many times. Since version 0.6, PCL has been migrated to Windows, MacOS and Linux systems, and it has also been put into use in Android system, which makes PCL applications easy to transplant and publish in many aspects.

Baidu encyclopedia -PCL