Patent ID: 7737973

Claim:
A method comprising: defining a line of sight of a point cloud displayed on a display of a computer, the point cloud being acquired by a laser range finding apparatus, the point cloud including a plurality of points that together represent a scene; estimating normal vectors for individual points of the plurality of points; determining the appearance on the display of the individual points of the plurality of points based on the normal vectors and the line of sight, wherein: the determination of the appearance of the individual points includes a modification of a characteristic of the individual points, wherein the step of determining the appearance includes determining the appearance of the at least one point based on a power function: t=|x| a where x=n·v, n is the normal vector, v is the view direction, and t is the transparency value which varies from 0.0 representing opaque to 1.0 representing totally transparent where “a” is a power value not equal to “1.0”; the characteristic of the individual points is varied between the individual points to highlight certain points of the individual points; and displaying the individual points of the plurality of points on the display according to the determined appearance of the individual points.