Convert PCD to PLY — Free, No Upload Needed

About This Converter

PCD is the native format of the Point Cloud Library, and it turns up wherever depth cameras, LiDAR scanners and robots do. Its header names the fields each point carries, and the data that follows may be written three ways: as ASCII, as binary, or as compressed binary. All three open here. Beyond x, y and z, a PCD file may carry packed rgb colour, per-point normals, an intensity value from the sensor, and integer labels left by a segmentation pass. PLY is the more portable of the two. It is the format MeshLab, CloudCompare, Blender and most scanning tools open without a plugin or a library, which is usually the whole reason for this conversion. Positions come across. Colour comes across. Per-point normals come across if the PCD had them. What does not come across is everything specific to the capture pipeline: intensity, labels and any non-standard field the header declared are dropped, and so is the viewpoint line that records where the sensor was sitting. If you rely on intensity for a return-strength view, or on labels for a classification you already computed, do that work before converting, or keep the PCD alongside the PLY. Organised clouds flatten. A PCD with a real width and height describes a grid of points that maps back onto the camera image; PLY has no equivalent concept, so the result is a plain list. The points stay in their original order, but nothing in the file states the grid any more. The PLY is written as binary rather than text, which usually makes it considerably smaller than an ASCII PCD of the same cloud and roughly comparable to a binary one. Positions are stored as 32-bit floats and colour as one byte per channel. Units are recorded in neither format, so a cloud in metres and a cloud in millimetres look the same, and the viewer here normalises the cloud to fit its grid, which is a display convenience rather than a measurement. Everything runs in your browser: your capture is never uploaded, and there is no account to create.