A hierarchical splat-based renderer for the interactive visualisation of large 3D-scanned datasets.

The thesis presents an efficient rendering, management and storage system for large 3D datasets acquired by means of laser scanners, proposing techniques for efficient real-time rendering and data compression. A point based approach has been adopted, using point splats techniques and eliminating the need of traditional 3D meshes connectivity infos with a great performances increase. At the same time a lossy hierarchical compression scheme for the point cloud and related attributes is presented, that achieve great compression results at the cost of a slight reduction on perceived quality