README for CYL_SEG

This is a simple driver program for running a Sample Consensus segmentation for cylindrical models.

I. COMPILATION AND INSTALLATION

I.i Prerequisites: pcl (including command line tools, and all its dependencies), cmake (version 3.11), internet connection (for downloading Gtest).

I.ii Procedure:

1. Change to the top level directory of the project.
2. execute: mkdir build && cd build
3. execute: cmake ..
4. execute: make

I.ii Notes:

1. The unit testing framework GTest will be downloaded during the build process, this requires an internet connection.
2. A reference implementation will be built and run during the build process to generate data for the test cases to use in comparisons.
3. The main executable "cylinder_segmentation" will be found in the "src" subdirectory of the "build" directory.

II. RUNNING THE TESTS

Execute the following command from the build directory after building the project to run the tests:

$make test

If you desire verbose output from the tests then you can alternatively run

$make test ARGS="-V"

III. USAGE

./cylinder segmentation <dist. threshold planar> <dist. threshold cylinder>

: points beyond this distance in m are filtered. : Number of neighbors to use for surface normals estimation of the input point cloud. : The surface normals' influence parameter. <dist. threshold planar> : distance threshold from plane inlier points to planar model. (m) <dist. threshold cylinder> : distance threshold from cylinder inlier points to the cylindrical model. (m) : Maximum iterations for segmentation for generation of planar model. : Maximum iterations for segmentation for generation of cylindrical model.
: input .pcd file for cylinder segmentation.

III.i Notes:

1. The program writes two output files output_plane.pcd, and output_cylinder.pcd for the output of plane segmentation (planar inliers) and cylinder segmentation (cylinder inliers).
2. The output files are in the .pcd format.

IV. VISUALIZATION

There are three options. One can change directories to the top level directory of the project and run the script run_and_visualize.sh with the same arguments as the cylinder_segmentation executable. Otherwise one can use pcl_viewer directly, or the visualize.sh script with the output pcd file as argument to visualize the result. Note that this requires pcl tools to be installed and pcl_viewer to be in the PATH.

Also one can use web_pcd_viewer.html to view pcd files in your browser. Once you open this page with your browser you can enter the relative path to your pcd file in order to open it. This will only accept pcd files in ascii or binary formats. Compressed binary formats are currently not supported.