CloudCompare: Cloud-to-Cloud Distance Tool

Cloud-to-Cloud distance tool within CloudCompare software computes the distances between two 3D entities, either point clouds or meshes.

In this tutorial, we compare 2 3D point clouds of a landfill, mapped with a UAV in two different dates, to detect terrain settlements and new deposits for volume calculations.

The cloud to cloud tool calculates the distance between two point clouds using the 'nearest neighbor distance' method. In this approach, CloudCompare identifies the closest point in the reference cloud for each point in the cloud being compared and measures the Euclidean distance between them.

The compared point cloud hosts newly generated scalar fields with differencing information displayed in various color scales.