Patent ID: 8391610

Claim:
A method for using a computer for rapidly displaying and manipulating a point cloud composed of a plurality of data expressing three-dimensional attributes, the point cloud resulting from a scan with a laser system, the method comprising the steps of: determining a partition structure based on the size of the point cloud and a predetermined leaf-block size, the partition structure including a leaf-node having a capacity substantially equal to the predetermined leaf-block size, the leaf-node composing the highest level of the partition structure, which includes at least the highest level and a lower level composed of at least one lower-level node; initiating the scan; adding data to memory as it is collected until the data reaches the leaf-block size; indexing data as the data is collected, wherein indexing includes establishing a boundary based on three-dimensional attributes of the data; storing the boundary when the data indexed according to the indexing step reaches a predetermined node capacity, wherein the predetermined node capacity is the capacity of a node in the partition structure; and storing the data of the leaf-block size to form a leaf-block.