A GPGPU-based Pipeline for Accelerated Rendering of Point Clouds

Abstract

Direct rendering of large point clouds has become common practice in architecture and archaeology in recent years. Due to the high point density no mesh is reconstructed from the scanned data, but the points can be rendered directly as primitives of a graphics API like OpenGL. However, these APIs and the hardware, which they are based on, have been optimized to process triangle meshes. Although current API versions provide lots of control over the hardware, e.g. by using shaders, some hardware components concerned with rasterization of primitives are still hidden from the programmer. In this paper we show that it might be beneficial for point primitives to abandon the standard graphics APIs and directly switch to a GPGPU API like OpenCL.