Massive 3D point cloud visualization by generating artificial center points from multi-resolution cube grid structure

3D point cloud is widely used in Architecture, Civil Engineering, Medical, Computer Graphics, and many other fields. Due to the improvement of 3D laser scanner, a massive 3D point cloud whose gigantic file size is bigger than computer's memory requires efficient preprocessing and visualization. We suggest a data structure to solve the problem; a 3D point cloud is gradually subdivided by arbitrary-sized cube grids structure and corresponding point cloud subsets generated by the center of each grid cell are achieved while preprocessing. A massive 3D point cloud file is tested through two algorithms: QSplat and ours. Our algorithm, grid-based, showed slower speed in preprocessing but performed faster rendering speed comparing to QSplat. Also our algorithm is further designed to editing or segmentation using the original coordinates of 3D point cloud.