CloudCompare forum

Hello all. I am performing a comparison of LiDAR and Photogrammetry using a retaining wall scan as a case study. In this project I am computing a cloud-cloud scalar layer to display the overall differences between the two near-identical clouds collected through different imaging techniques. I am unsure what the "Cloud Compare Absolute Distances" equates to in terms of real world. What are the units of these absolute distances?

The 'absolute distances' just means that it's absolute, and not signed.

Then, CC doesn't know anything about your cloud/points units (it's almost never stored in standard file formats surprisingly). Therefore it simply displays the coordinates as they were stored in the original file, and all distances or other values are computed in the same implicit units.

(otherwise, for accurate comparison, you may want to use M3C2 instead ... it's more robust, more accurate, and it gives signed distances).