Survey on Points-Driven Computer Graphics

A point cloud is a set of discrete points distributed in 3D space. The development of 3D scanning technology makes it possible to rapidly capture and sample the shapes of objects as point clouds. Points-driven computer graphics is hence now widely applied in many fields, such as reverse engineering, digital city, cultural relics preservation and robotics. This survey briefly introduces the recent computer graphics research based on point clouds in four aspects: capturing, resampling, representation and reconstruction. It provides the readers a big picture on this new rising field, showing state-of-the-arts, study trends and potential research directions in the future.