PointMatcherPlugin

WARNING: This is a WIP, thus there is no stable release yet.

PointMatcherPlugin is a plugin that allows to configure libpointmatcher's ICP pipeline from ParaView interface, while allowing a direct visualization of the data transformed by each element of the pipeline.

Build Instructions

To proper build this plugin it is necessary to follow three steps:

• Build ParaView
• Build and install libpointmatcher
• Build PointMatcherPlugin

Build ParaView

ParaView source code can be downloaded from here using:

cd ~/  #or any other directory to keep the sources
git clone --recursive git@github.com:Kitware/ParaView.git

The --recursive option will make sure the sources of external projects needed to build paraview (e.g. VTK) are also downloaded.

Now select a version of ParaView and VTK to build. The plugin was developed using ParaView 5.0.1 and VTK 7.0.0, so using these versions should be good.

cd ~/ParaView
git checkout v5.0.1
cd ~/ParaView/VTK
git checkout v7.0.0

Now build Paraview. If you want you can use ccmake . to configure some build flags, like CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX and PARAVIEW_ENABLE_PYTHON. Note that the build process may take a while.

cd ~/ParaView
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ../
ccmake .  #optional
make

If you want to install it, configure the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX flag and install with:

ccmake .      #to configure CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX if not done already
make install  #or sudo make install

Build libpointmatcher

You can download libpointmatcher using:

cd ~/
git clone git@github.com:ethz-asl/libpointmatcher.git
cd libpointmatcher

To build and install it you should follow the instructions on libpointmatcher repository page.

Build PointMatcherPlugin

To build the plugin, you should inform the build directory of ParaView. This can be done with:

cd ~/
git clone git@github.com:Ellon/PointMatcherPlugin.git
cd PointMatcherPlugin
mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DParaView_DIR=~/ParaView/build ../

Now you should have a shared library in the build directory (libvtkPMFilters.so on Linux). This is the file that should be loaded on ParaView to use this plugin.

Using the plugin

PointMatcherPlugin can be loaded through Tools > Manage Plugins... menu. On the plugins window click on Load New... button and select the shared library generated when you built the plugin. You might also want to enable Auto Load so that the plugin gets automatically loaded.

The libpointmatcher filters are available from Filters > Point Matcher menu. You should follow the normal ParaView workflow to build the pipeline. If you don't know how to use ParaView yet, the ParaView Guide is a good place to start.

Bug reporting

Please use github's issue tracker to report bugs.