CloudCompare forum

Hi
Does anyone know if there is a tool in CC to calculate the average distance between points within a single point cloud (not the distances between points from 2 point clouds)? This would be a really useful value to know for a point cloud. I've searched the documentation and forum but can't find anything that fits this description.
Thanks!

In fact, the actual version of the "Tools > Other > Density" is doing something approaching.

It computes for each point a cloud the distance to its nearest neighbor in the same cloud (let's call it 'radius'). Then it outputs the 'density' as d = 1 / Volume(sphere(radius)) = 1 / (4/3×π×radius^3).

So you don't get exactly what your looking for but something related (= constant / radius^3).

Not sure it helps ;)

P.S. : this tool is going to change (the user will have to give its own fixed radius as a parameter and CC will compute the actual density inside the corresponding sphere around each point. But if you think it's usefull we can recycle the old code so as to output exactly what you are looking for (i.e. simply the distance to the nearest neighbor).

For the records, the next official version (2.5.3, coming out soon) will the distance to the nearest neighbor in place of the old 'density' value (Tools > Other > Density > Approximate (dist. to nearest neighbor)).