edge extraction from 3D point cloud

Hi, I have a point cloud data in .txt file. I would like to extract straight lines from the point cloud and want to plot them. Could you please assist?

[Anton Semechko]

How big is the point cloud (i.e., how many point samples)? And do you know if the points have been assigned normals by the scanner?

[Satarupa Khamaru]

Hi Anton, the file size is 15MB and have around 5,00,000 points in that. Yes, the points have been assigned the normals by the scanner. Thanks for the response.

[Anton Semechko]

The reason I was asking is because it is much easier to identify geometric features (e.g., line segments) from meshes than point clouds; and normals can facilitate surface reconstruction. However, there are methods that can extract feature lines directly from point clouds (e.g., see [1] and references therein). Unfortunately, I do not have any first hand experience implementing these methods or know of any open-source implementations. I can help you with surface reconstruction, if that's the route you want to go.

[1] Lin et al., 2015, 'Line segment extraction for large scale unorganized point clouds', ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing

[Satarupa Khamaru]

thank you Anton.