RayCloudTools: A Concise Interface for Analysis and Manipulation of Ray Clouds

We describe a new toolset for the manipulation and analysis of ray clouds (3D maps defined by a set of rays from a moving lidar to the scanned surfaces). Unlike point clouds, ray clouds contain information on free-space (air) as well as surface geometry. This allows the toolset to perform volumetric functions and analysis that cannot be done on point clouds alone. The presented toolset consists of seventeen command-line functions, with a C++ library available for those who require more control or tight integration. Our aim is that RayCloudTools is as useful and simple as possible, and we use this paper to demonstrate its utility, and to assess its ease of use, with comparison to established cloud processing libraries.