A point cloud is a data structure used to represent a collection of multi-dimensional points and is commonly used to represent three-dimensional data. In a 3D point cloud, the points usually represent the X, Y, and Z geometric coordinates of an underlying sampled surface. When color information is present (see the figures below), the point cloud becomes 4D.
Point clouds can be acquired from hardware sensors such as stereo cameras, 3D scanners, or time-of-flight cameras, or generated from a computer program synthetically. PCL supports natively the OpenNI 3D interfaces, and can thus acquire and process data from devices such as the PrimeSensor 3D cameras, the Microsoft Kinect, or the Asus XTionPRO.
OpenNI
For more information about point clouds and 3D processing please visit our documentation page