Polyworks IAlign help for point cloud registration

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John McCarthy
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Polyworks IAlign help for point cloud registration

Post by John McCarthy »

In Polyworks IAlign I use the "best-Fit" Alignment tool when i know my registrations are close. Once the command is started and it's processing the images, the speed at which it processes these images slows down. By 10 minutes it's half the speed, by half hour it is pretty slow. The only way to remedy this is to stop the processing, save, exit - close the application, reload and start the process again. I have 128 GB of ram, so that can't be my issue? Any suggestions? Thanks.
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NOVAMECH
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Re: Polyworks IAlign help for point cloud registration

Post by NOVAMECH »

Hi John,

Perhaps we can organize a Team Viewer Call - and I can see what is the problem. PolyWorks is a BEAST and Very Very little knowledge about for the taking. happy to help where I can - But not a super expert.


Next week is good for me.


Kind Regards



Nick Bush
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nickherath
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Re: Polyworks IAlign help for point cloud registration

Post by nickherath »

John,
Polyworks IMAlign is a great tool out of the box for registration of terrestrial scan data and can be enhanced even further if you know a thing or two about macro programming.
The most common problem with excessive RAM usage in Polyworks is due to incorrect import settings. Remember what you see in IMAlign is a representation of the structured point cloud using the interpolation settings to extract and display the point cloud normals. You don't need a ridiculous number of interpolated points to get a good registration.
A few tips are:
- Import your point clouds at 1/4 resolution.
- Ensure you are using Range and Angle interpolation setting which is much more efficient.
- Refine your interpolation settings so the resulting point cloud image is around 1 million interpolated points give or take. Check in properties and refine as necessary.
- Whilst doing your registration, only display the point clouds you need by hiding or ignoring in the treeview and make use of the static/dynamic display to drop the display resolution down if your graphics is starting to slow down. Only turn all the point clouds back on when you are doing your global adjustment.

For any project over 100 scans we prefer to register in Polyworks rather than Cyclone as we find it much faster and more visual to analyse your registration and also works seamlessly with total station survey control.
A laptop with 32GB of RAM can handle 100-200 scans loaded at once quite comfortably, a more powerful computer with 64GB RAM can easily handle 400-500+ loaded at once.
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