Paraview plugin

[Ellon]

Some time ago I put some effort to create a plugin to Paraview that would wrap the modules of libpointmatcher into the Paraview pipeline. The code can be found here.

The main idea was:

1. Be able to configure a libpointmatcher icp pipeline in Paraview (filters and parameters);
2. Be able to visualize the intermediary clouds in the filtering processing;
3. Be able to call the ICP from Paraview, and visualize the result and the iterations of ICP (the way it is done with VTKInspector, but without dumping the result into files);
4. Ultimately, be able to save/load the YAML config file.

I implemented all filters I had in my checkout of libpointmatcher at that time. I also developed an auto-generation of the code that wraps the data filters to Paraview by parsing the output of pmicp -l. The commits related to the autogen can be found (at the time of this writing) in the branch autogen.

I stopped developing it for lack of time, and also because I found a problem I didn't know how to overcome in Paraview. Apparently Paraview needs to know the number of elements in the output sequence in advance, and we can only know in advance the max number of iterations of icp loop, and not how many iterations were actually performed. My last efforts to wrap the libpointmatcher's icp process in a Paraview filter can be found (again, at the time of this writing) in the branch icpfilter_xml.

I'm sharing it here so this information doesn't disappear, and in the case someone wants to continue developing it before I do.