Evaluating a New Display of Information Generated from LiDAR Point Clouds

The design of a texture display for three-dimensional Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) point clouds is investigated. The objective is to present a low fidelity display that is simple to compute in real-time, which utilizes the pattern processing capabilities of a human operator to afford an understanding of the environment. The efficacy of the display is experimentally evaluated by in comparison with a baseline point cloud rendering. Subjects were shown data based on virtual hills, and were asked to plan the least-steep traversal, and identify the hill from a set of distractors. The major conclusions are: comprehension of LiDAR point clouds from the sensor origin is difficult without further processing of the data, a separated vantage point improves understanding of the data, and a simple computation to present local point cloud derivative data significantly improves the understanding of the environment, even when observed from the sensor origin.MAS