Open Source 3D Modeling Software

The Point Cloud Library (PCL) is a standalone, large scale, open project for 2D/3D image and point cloud processing. PCL is released under the terms of the BSD license, and thus free for commercial and research use. Whether you’ve just discovered PCL or you’re a long time veteran, this page contains links to a set of resources that will help consolidate your knowledge on PCL and 3D processing. An additional Wiki resource for developers is available too. To simplify both usage and development, we split PCL into a series of modular libraries. PCL is cross-platform, and has been successfully compiled and deployed on Linux, MacOS, Windows, and Android. To simplify development, PCL is split into a series of smaller code libraries, that can be compiled separately. This modularity is important for distributing PCL on platforms with reduced computational or size constraints.

OpenReco is an open-source photogrammetry and reality-capture platform designed to turn photographs into accurate 3D models, dense point clouds, textured meshes, DEMs, and orthomosaics. Built for researchers, drone operators, surveyors, developers, hobbyists, and digital artists, OpenReco aims to provide a transparent and extensible alternative to proprietary photogrammetry software. The project focuses on ease of use, performance, and reproducible workflows while embracing the open-source ecosystem. OpenReco supports image alignment, camera calibration, sparse and dense reconstruction, mesh generation, texturing, and export to common formats. Whether you're reconstructing archaeological sites, creating digital twins, generating terrain models, or building assets for games and visualization, OpenReco provides a powerful foundation without licensing restrictions.

OpenVL is a framework for handling, processing & visualizing volumetric data (CT, MRI etc). It provides: powerful data access & layout API, plugins for volume processing tasks (image processing, segmentation etc), and support for multiple file-formats.

Since December 2008, UCL-MSSL developed a platform independent stereo application in collaboration with JPL, NASA as a subtask of EU-FP7 PRoViSG. This work was originally proposed for two months of work, but it was rescheduled to run untill August 2011 after realising its synergetic relationship with other UCL tasks within the ProVisG project. Within this time period, UCL delivered consortium members a stereo application (called StereoWS ver. 1.0), which integrates various practical stereo tools into the JPL’s stereo rendering engine (called JADIS). In addition, a part of software (called StView ver.1.0) was ported to a web-based GIS system (e.g., ProGIS) and ProVIP as a solution for stereo visualisation. Apart from the stereo visualisation, some useful stereo tools (e.g., stereo matcher or stereo image processing tools) have been extracted from UCL’s previous development for HRSC data processing, and modified for close-range stereo imagery.