Converting from .ply to .pcd format

Question

I have a .ply file and I want to convert it to a .pcd format but not exactly sure how.

I have tried the methods described by the op here Convertion of .ply format to .pcd format but they are not sufficient/doesn't work anymore.

when I try to open the .ply file its just a binary file except the header which looks something like this:

ply
format binary_little_endian 1.0
comment generated by Cartographer
element vertex 000000207134849
property float x
property float y
property float z
property uchar red
property uchar green
property uchar blue
property float intensity
end_header
bf/B¿ğBè)¿...
...

Thus I don't evet know where to start the conversion.

How do I do the conversion ?

Any method/doc would really help

user_352173 · Answer

I Haven't tried, but something seems to be available in Ubuntu distributions probably doing sudo apt install pcl-tools:

pcl_ply2pcd http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/man1/pcl_ply2pcd.1.html
pcl_pcd2ply http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/man1/pcl_pcd2ply.1.html

user_2230585 · Answer

UPDATE: I now have a valid solution and therefore answering my question.

I have found this https://github.com/ryanfb/pcl-tools github repo that has a very handy tool called ply2pcd

so basically do the following to get to conversion form .ply to .pcd

git clone https://github.com/ryanfb/pcl-tools 
cmake . 
make 
cd pcl-tools 
chmod +x ply2pcd 
./ply2pcd "path/target.ply" "path/out.pcd"

Note: You need at least as much RAM as the size of .ply file

user_10334964 · Answer

Another option is to use the Open3D library, as described here:

import open3d as o3d
pcd = o3d.io.read_point_cloud("source_pointcloud.ply")
o3d.io.write_point_cloud("sink_pointcloud.pcd", pcd)

https://stackoverflow.com/a/62488893/10334964

Converting from .ply to .pcd format

3 Answers