Olivia: A Developer-Friendly "Open Lidar VIsualiser and Analyser" for Point Clouds with 3D Stereoscopic View

LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is being a hot topic in the remote sensing field, and the development of robust point cloud processing methods is essential for the adoption of this technology. In order to understand, evaluate, and show these methods, it is key to visualise their outputs. Several visualisation tools exist, although it is usually difficult to find the suited one for a specific application. On the one hand, proprietary (closed source) projects are not flexible enough because they cannot be modified to adapt them to particular applications. On the other hand, current open source projects lack an effortless way to create custom visualisations. For these reasons, we present Olivia, a developer-friendly open source visualisation tool for point clouds. Olivia provides the backbone for any type of point cloud visualisation, and it can be easily extended and tailored to meet the requirements of a specific application. It supports stereoscopic 3D view, aiding both the evaluation and presentation of processing methods. In this paper, several cases of study are presented to demonstrate the usefulness of Olivia along with its computational performance.

keywords: data visualisation, LiDAR point clouds, open source software, stereoscopic 3D