libpointmatcher is a modular ICP library, useful for robotics and computer vision.
libpointmatcher depends on:
- Eigen version 3, a modern C++ matrix and linear-algebra library,
- libnabo version 1.0.1, a fast K Nearest Neighbour library for low-dimensional spaces.
- Doxygen, a documentation-generation tool
- yaml-cpp, a YAML 1.2 parser and emitter (optional)
libpointmatcher is being developed by François Pomerleau and Stéphane Magnenat as part of our work at ASL-ETH.
You can read the latest changes in the release notes.
Binaries for Ubuntu Linux are available on our PPA:
Once you have added the PPA to your system, you can install libpointmatcher using
sudo apt-get install libpointmatcher-dev
If you have built binaries for other systems, please tell us.
libpointmatcher uses CMake as build system. The complete compilation process depends on the system you are using (Linux, Mac OS X or Windows). You will find a nice introductory tutorial in this video.
If your operating system does not provide it, you must get Eigen.
It only needs to be downloaded and extracted.
libnabo must be downloaded and installed, please follow the libnabo's documentation to do so.
If you want to use YAML-enabled config files, you have to install yaml-cpp; on Ubuntu, ROS repositories provide yaml-cpp0.2.6-dev.
Under Unix, assuming that Eigen, libnabo and optionally yaml-cpp are installed system-wide, you can compile (with optimisation and debug information) and install libpointmatcher in /usr/local with the following commands, run in the top-level directory of libpointmatcher's sources:
SRC_DIR=`pwd`
BUILD_DIR=${SRC_DIR}/build
mkdir -p ${BUILD_DIR} && cd ${BUILD_DIR}
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo ${SRC_DIR}
# if Eigen or libnabo are not available system-wide, run at that point:
# cmake-gui .
# cmake-gui allows you to tell the location of the header
# and the static libraries of Eigen and libnabo
make
sudo make install
These lines will compile libpointmatcher in a build sub-directory and therefore keep your source tree clean.
Note that you could compile libpointmatcher anywhere you have write access, such as in /tmp/libpointmatcher.
This out-of-source build is a nice feature of CMake under Unixes.
If Eigen, libnabo or yaml-cpp are not installed system-wide, you might have to tell CMake where to find them.
You can do this with a command-line tool, ccmake, or with a graphical tool, cmake-gui.
Please read the CMake documentation for more information.
Building libpointmatcher also builds its documentation, available in the doc/html folder in the build directory.
In 2D:
examples/pmicp ${SRC_DIR}/examples/data/2D_oneBox.csv ${SRC_DIR}/examples/data/2D_twoBoxes.csv
In 3D:
examples/pmicp ${SRC_DIR}/examples/data/car_cloud401.csv ${SRC_DIR}/examples/data/car_cloud400.csv
Use Paraview to view the results.
On Ubuntu, you can install Paraview with sudo apt-get install paraview.
You can list the available modules with:
examples/pmicp -l
If you have compiled libpointmatcher with yaml-cpp enabled, you can configure the ICP chain without any recompilation by passing a configuration file to the pmicp command using the --config switch. An example file is available in examples/data/default.yaml.
To develope with libpointmatcher, please read the generated documentation in the doc/html folder in the build directory.
Please use github's issue tracker to report bugs.
If you use libpointmatcher in an academic context, please cite the following publication:
@article{Pomerleau12comp,
author = {Pomerleau, Fran{\c c}ois and Colas, Francis and Siegwart, Roland and Magnenat, St{\'e}phane},
title = {{Comparing ICP Variants on Real-World Data Sets}},
journal = {Autonomous Robots},
year = {2013},
volume = {34},
number = {3},
pages = {133--148},
month = feb
}
and/or
@INPROCEEDINGS{pomerleau11tracking,
author = {Fran{\c c}ois Pomerleau and St{\'e}phane Magnenat and Francis Colas and Ming Liu and Roland Siegwart},
title = {Tracking a Depth Camera: Parameter Exploration for Fast ICP},
booktitle = {Proc. of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
publisher = {IEEE Press},
pages = {3824--3829},
year = {2011}
}
If you are using libpointmatcher in your project and you would like to have it listed here, please contact François Pomerleau or Stéphane Magnenat.
- European Project NIFTi (FP7 ICT-247870): Search and rescue project in dynamic environments. Results: video of multi-floor reconstruction and video of railyard reconstruction. All results with real-time computation.
- NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline: Planetary reconstruction from satellite observations. Results: used for Mars, Moon and Earth point clouds.
- Armasuisse S+T UGV research program ARTOR: Development of techniques for reliable autonomous navigation of a wheeled robot in rough, outdoor terrain. Results: video of urban and dynamic 3D reconstruction and video of open space 3D reconstruction with real-time computation.
- Swiss National Science Foundation - Limnobotics: Robotic solution for toxic algae monitoring in lacs. Result: video of 3D shore reconstruction with real-time computation.
libpointmatcher is released under a permissive BSD license.