I wonder, how it's possible to store huge sets of laser scanned point cloud data in PostGIS, with the time-aspect for processing it in mind. I know, there exists a geometry-object Point
in PostGIS. But as far as I know it saves each point in a new tupel, which can make searching for any certain point a very slow process, if a few millions or more of them are stored.
I found a paper from HSR Universtiy of Applied Sciences Rapperswill, discussing this topic. It suggests three ways to store such data: Whole data in one tupel
, Each point in one tupel
or Splitting Data into Blocks
which are referenced by info-tables, holding the extends of each block. As the third way seems the most useful for locating stored points, I wonder if anyone already has made some experiences with it?
The paper can be found here: http://wiki.hsr.ch/Datenbanken/files/pgsql_point_cloud.pdf
Last but not least, I stumpled across a project on github, which seems to deal with point cloud manners in PostgeSQL. Unfortunately not much information about it around the net. So the same question here: Has someone already made some experiences with it? Is it usable for such purposes?
Project can be found here: https://github.com/pramsey/pointcloud
I would also be glad to hear about other suggestions, ideas or experiences, if there are any. But i must admit, that non-commercial solutions are prefered.