Generation and VR visualization of 3D point clouds for drone target validation assisted by an operator

Abstract

In this paper, we present a process to simulate 3D data; as an unmanned combat aerial vehicle (drone) equipped with a Ladar sensor could do. The data obtained are colored 3D point clouds in where potential targets are highlighted. Our objective with these simulated corpus of 3D point cloud data is to explore the usage of Virtual Reality settings to validate the selection of a target. To do that we detail an implementation of a VR headset to visualize our simulated data. We also introduce a metric to estimate the visibility of the target.