PLY files appear deformed in PCL

[VictorLamoine]

Some imported PLY files appear deformed when visualized in CloudViewer or PCLVisualizer. PCD files does not appear deformed :

The PCD file

The PLY file

Latest Trunk version (pulled april 9 2014)
Ubuntu 12.04 x64

PLY file header :

ply
format ascii 1.0
comment VCGLIB generated
element vertex 7334
property float x
property float y
property float z
element face 0
property list uchar int vertex_indices
end_header

Shared library dependencies :

dell@M6700:~/Copy/PLY_deformed/build$ ldd visualizer | grep pcl
    libpcl_common.so.1.7 => /usr/local/lib/libpcl_common.so.1.7 (0x00007f16fe689000)
    libpcl_io.so.1.7 => /usr/local/lib/libpcl_io.so.1.7 (0x00007f16fd6d4000)
    libpcl_visualization.so.1.7 => /usr/local/lib/libpcl_visualization.so.1.7 (0x00007f16fd3ac000)
    libpcl_io_ply.so.1.7 => /usr/local/lib/libpcl_io_ply.so.1.7 (0x00007f16f7d71000)
    libpcl_kdtree.so.1.7 => /usr/local/lib/libpcl_kdtree.so.1.7 (0x00007f16f73ad000)

See :
#510
#373

[taketwo]

Hi Victor, thanks for the showcase project. I can confirm the issue. So it has something to do specifically with visualization, because converting the file to pcd using pcl_ply2pcd yields a non-deformed cube.

@nizar-sallem Any ideas about what might be the issue?

[VictorLamoine]

www.pcl-users.org/Problem-with-displaying-PLY-point-cloud-tp4035248p4035364.html

Rodo - thanks for suggesting that. I finally found out what is going on. When
reading the PLY file a sensor_orientation_ field is somehow filled by
reading function (I don't know how it is happening since I have precompiled
version of PCL and I didn't have time to check it yet). If I call a
setIdentity() on sensor_orientation_ after reading the PLY file everything
is fine with displying.

Initializing sensor_orientation_ to the identity matrix might be a solution

I updated the test project, know we know exactly why the file is deformed:

Loaded ../clouds/cloud.ply successfuly
points[]: 7334
width: 7334
height: 1
is_dense: 0
sensor origin (xyz): [0, 0, 0] / orientation (xyzw): [0.5, 0, 0, 0]

The last line should be:
sensor origin (xyz): [0, 0, 0] / orientation (xyzw): [0, 0, 0, 1]