PCL library and concurrency

Question

I have started working in a project using the PCL library under Windows 7. My question is if PCL provides any structures or algorithms for concurrent work. For example, creating a new point cloud from a data set concurrently; something like pcl::io::loadPCDFileKCores. I have searched around in the API documentation and Google but find nothing.

Thanks a lot!.

Answer 1

PCL 1.7 does offer some facilities for exploting multiple processing cores on a system using GPU or CPU.

PCL uses multiple CPU cores on a system through the OpenMP API. You can check for multiple core enabled classes by searching PCL documentation for the "OpenMP" keyword (naive, but effective way!). As at the time of writing the reported OpenMP enabled classes are:

• pcl::RangeImage
• pcl::tracking::ParticleFilterOMPTracker
• pcl::FPFHEstimationOMP
• pcl::NormalEstimationOMP
• pcl::Narf
• pcl::tracking::KLDAdaptiveParticleFilterOMPTracker
• pcl::SHOTColorEstimationOMP
• pcl::SHOTEstimationOMP
• pcl::NormalEstimationOMP< PointInT, Eigen::MatrixXf >

If you search the PCL documentation for the GPU or CUDA keywords a similar, but much longer, list of GPU-enabled classes is reported.