Making points or multipoint features from point clouds was one of the most popular requests from our focus group. And this is understandable - many software products still do not "understand" point cloud geometry, however, as this kind of data is getting popular, specialists need a way of accessing and using it.


We picked two popular GIS formats to try point cloud to point coercion.

Point Cloud to Geodatabase

Geodatabase supports multipoint geometry, so we can use a "Boxed Multipoint" option on PointCloudCoercer with no more than 50,000 points per chunk:



The output geodatabase can be visualized and navigated through in ArcScene:

Point Cloud to MapInfo

MapInfo supports aggregates of points, however, if we need to preserve components as attributes, we should make individual points:



In this case, PointCloudCoercer preserves Intensity, Classification, Return, and Number Of Returns components as attributes.


This allows making thematic maps in MapInfo. The screenshot below shows a map with points colored by intensity: