Working with Point Clouds - Colorization Workflow

Contents

• Introduction
• Step 1: Collect your data
• Step 2: Configure your scan job
• Step 3: Start processing
• Step 4: View your final output

Introduction

Emesent’s colorization feature allows you to augment your point clouds with true color, providing additional context for visualization and analysis. Colorization works by merging Hovermap’s LiDAR scan data with video recorded by a GoPro that has been mounted to Hovermap.

The basic process for colorization is as follows.

Step 1: Collect your data

1. Go to Working with colorization for more information on how to set up your Hovermap and GoPro for colorization and for colorization-specific scanning techniques.

2. Check that you have everything necessary to create a colorized point cloud:

   • An updated license dongle with a valid Colourisation license.

   • Your Hovermap scan folder (containing raw data from Hovermap).

   • A GoPro video file (an MP4 file contained within the scan folder).

Step 2: Configure your scan job

1. Open Emesent Aura. Make sure you have an active Colorize license.

2. In the Process tab, click Process Scan.

3. In the Configure New Scan Job panel, select the Colorize workflow.

4. Click Add Dataset.

5. In the dialog box that displays, browse for the folder that contains the point cloud to be colorized. Ensure the scan has been processed and the .mp4 file or .360 file is in the same directory. If the video file is detected, it will appear in the Video file(s) column (multiple video files will appear if detected depending on the scan duration).

6. If there are multiple output folders in the selected scan folder, click the arrow beside the output folder then select from the list.
   In addition, in the Scan File column, the non-georeferenced output is selected by default. If you want to colorize a georeferenced point cloud, click the arrow beside the scan file then select the file that is labelled Scan Processed with Landmarks.

7. Once you have selected the point cloud to colorize. click Save.

8. In the Location field, enter the preferred name for the output folder. Emesent Aura will create this folder, which stores all the processed results and data, as a child directory within the raw point cloud folder.

9. Select the processing profile to use. Go to the Processing Profiles section in the Emesent Aura user manual for more information on available profiles.

Step 3: Start processing

1. Click Start to begin processing. The panel will show a progress bar showing how far along you are in your processing job. In addition to the progress bar, the elapsed time of the processing job is shown to the right.
2. When prompted, click Review Frames.
3. In the file explorer window, manually delete any unwanted frames from your video.
4. Once the unwanted frames are removed, return to Emesent Aura and click Resume.

Step 4: View your final output

1. Once processing has been completed, click Open folder to view the output folder or View to view your colorized point cloud in the viewport.

2. Click Close to remove the scan information from the processing space.

3. The image frames used during colorization can be exported with the colorized point cloud. These images are found in the Intermediate files > frame_extraction > frames folder. This folder also contains a tab-separated CSV file, which provides pose information in the following format:

   1. Time stamp

   2. Latitude

   3. Longitude

   4. Height

   5. Roll

   6. Pitch

   7. Heading

   8. Image filename