How to extract intensity information from planar surface?

[Chad]

Hi,

I am busy with my postgraduate studies and looking at doing a performance evaluation of the Emesent's new Hovermap system which generates a point cloud and exports it in laz. format.

For starters I want to assess the returned intensity for various targets (30x30 cm) at different distances and incidence angles. Is there an easy way of fitting a planar surface to the target (30x30 cm) and then exporting the information of the points within.
I want the intensity of each point as well as its xyz coordinate. I'll be doing this repeatedly for may surfaces so a simple and easy way would be of great benefit.

I am new to CloudCompare and any advice or tips would be of great help.

Thank you in advance!
Chad

[daniel]

I guess you can use the 'scissors' tool (Edit > Segment) to segment the points corresponding to the targets as individual clouds. And then you can fit a plane on each segmented cloud (with Tools > Fit > Plane).

You can also compute the distances between the cloud and the fitted plane afterwards (but the 'Fit > Plane' already outputs the RMS).

You can also export the cloud as an ASCII file (it will give you in clear text the coordinates and all the associated scalar values: intensity, etc.)