An easy way to enhance colored point cloud rendering

Example of shaded point cloud

1 – Load a colored point cloud in CloudCompare

2 – Use its PCV plugin to compute the ambient occlusion of the point cloud. Save the resulting point cloud as a ASCII file.

3 – Use the following command to apply the ambient occlusion to the RGB values :

awk ‘{ print $1 ” ” $2 ” ” $3 ” ” int($4*$7) ” ” int($5*$7) ” ” int($6*$7) }’ input.xyz >> output.xyz