curioustauseef / tviewer

A simple cloud viewer on top of PCL Visualizer

TViewer is a small visualization library built on top of PCL Visualizer. It provides a point cloud viewer that will come in handy when you need to visualize a number of different objects simultaneously with an ability to show/hide them individually using keyboard shortcuts.

The viewer maintains a collection of "visualization objects", each of which has a state (shown or hidden) and an associated keyboard shortcut that the user may use to toggle the state. You do not need to write any boiler-plate code for that, but rather simply create a visualization object and register it with the viewer:

viewer->add<PointCloudObject<pcl::PointXYZ>> ("cloud", "some point cloud", "c", cloud);

The presented code creates a new visualization object that displays cloud point cloud and that the user may show or hide by pressing c key. The objects themselves could be static or dynamic, which means that they might either have a particular data (point cloud) associated with them, or a function that generates new data.

The library also has a few more random features:

• saving/loading of camera viewpoint
• utility functions for handling keyboard input and point picking
• support for no GUI mode
• randomly shuffling colors in point clouds

Usage

In order to use TViewer simply clone this repository to the root of your project and drop the following lines into your 'CMakeLists.txt':

add_subdirectory(${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}/tviewer)
include_directories(${TVIEWER_INCLUDE_DIRS})
add_definitions(${TVIEWER_DEFINITIONS})

and do not forget to link your target with the library:

add_executable(my_app
  my_app.cpp
)
target_link_libraries(my_app
  ${PCL_LIBRARIES}
  ${TVIEWER_LIBRARIES}
)

In the source code you only need to include 'tviewer/tviewer.h'.