The CloudViewer

.. _cloud_viewer:

The CloudViewer is a straight forward, simple point cloud visualization, meant to get you up and viewing clouds in as little code as possible.

.. note::

The CloudViewer class is NOT meant to be used in multi-threaded applications! Please check the documentation on :pcl:PCLVisualizer<pcl::visualization::PCLVisualizer> or read the :ref:pcl_visualizer tutorial for thread safe visualization.

Simple Cloud Visualization

If you just want to visualize something in your app with a few lines of code, use a snippet like the following one:

.. code-block:: cpp :linenos:

#include <pcl/visualization/cloud_viewer.h>
//...
void 
foo ()
{
  pcl::PointCloud<pcl::PointXYZRGB>::Ptr cloud;
  //... populate cloud
  pcl::visualization::CloudViewer viewer ("Simple Cloud Viewer");
  viewer.showCloud (cloud);
  while (!viewer.wasStopped ())
  {
  }
}

A more complete sample:

The following shows how to run code on the visualization thread. The PCLVisualizer is the back end of the CloudViewer, but its running in its own thread. To access it you must use callback functions, to avoid the visualization concurrency issues. However care must be taken to avoid race conditions in your code, as the callbacks will be called from the visualization thread.

.. literalinclude:: sources/cloud_viewer/cloud_viewer.cpp :language: cpp :linenos:

Compiling and running the program

Add the following lines to your CMakeLists.txt file:

.. literalinclude:: sources/cloud_viewer/CMakeLists.txt :language: cmake :linenos:

After you have made the executable, you can run it like so::

$ ./cloud_viewer