3D Point Cloud Exploitation for Line of Sight Analysis

A Point Cloud is a data structure that represents a collection of n-dimensional points (usually in 3-D). Points are used to represent objects virtually for applications that require models for simulations, animations, and entertainment. These point clouds can also be a terrain representation of a location in which a Line of Sight (LOS) algorithm can be implemented to identify the visibility from a point to an object. Some possible uses for LOS are: building design, surveillance cameras, video games, telecommunications, and real estate. Due to the ever growing precision of sensors to extract the morphological information from real objects, point clouds have become denser. As a consequence, the time complexity of the algorithms that process that information has become a point of interest in many applications. Also, common algorithms utilized for image processing cannot be implemented to execute a line of sight analysis in a point cloud due to its data lacking a reference to adjacent points in the Euclidean space. For this reason, an original design was created for the LOS algorithm with the knowledge of its functionality and other point cloud algorithms such as K-nearest neighbor and Edge Detection. The algorithm is being implemented in C++ and after finalizing the sequential version we will develop a parallelized version with Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) to optimize the solution. This is considerable because of the massively parallel properties that the current sequential LOS algorithm has due to having various simple and independent instructions for each of the points in the collection.

Author(s):

Edwin Rivera    
Computer Engineering
University of Puerto Rico - Mayagüez
Puerto Rico

Yomar Ruiz    
Computer Engineering
University of Puerto Rico - Mayagüez
Puerto Rico

José Natal    
Computer Engineering
University of Puerto Rico - Mayagüez
Puerto Rico

Ivan Caballero    
Computer Engineering
University of Puerto Rico - Mayagüez
Puerto Rico

Stephanie García    
Computer Engineering
University of Puerto Rico - Mayagüez
Puerto Rico