.. toctree::

Overview
--------

PCL presents an advanced and extensive approach to the subject of 3D
perception, and it's meant to provide support for all the common 3D building
blocks that applications need. Written from a perspective of online sensor data
processing, PCL deals with point cloud data acquired from real sensing devices
including laser scanners, stereo cameras, and TOF cameras.

PCL is a fully templated, modern C++ library, with efficient backends for
modern CPUs (SSE optimized), and GPUs (CUDA). The plethora of state-of-the-art
algorithms implemented is large, with many new ones added on a weekly to
monthly basis -- acquisition, filtering, feature estimation, surface
reconstruction, registration, model fitting, and segmentation, are just a few
of the many topics covered by PCL.

The project is supported by an international community of robotics and perception
researchers, and would not exist without the contributions of many people and
companies. We thank everyone for their support!

Presentation
------------

The following overview presentation was given at the ROS Fall School at TUM in
November 2010.

.. raw:: html

   <p>
   <iframe src="http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://dev.pointclouds.org/attachments/download/16/PCL_November_2010.pdf&embedded=true" style="border: none;" width="600" height="480"></iframe>
   <a href="http://dev.pointclouds.org/attachments/download/16/PCL_November_2010.pdf">(download here)</a>
   </p>

