CGAL users discussion list

[Brice Rebsamen <>]

Hello

I'm want to compute the intersection of 2 3D objects. I want to decide 
whether there is significant overlap between the 2, to decide whether 
those are 2 observations of the same object. I imagined computing the 
intersection between the 2 convex hulls and measure the volume ratio 
between the intersection and one of the observations.

My raw input is a point cloud representation of the objects, which 
mostly samples the surface (e.g. 3D lidar representation, kinect, etc.). 
In order to get the volume, I can compute the convex hull for instance.

I looked at CGAL's doc, and found lots of methods to detect whether 
there is an intersection between 2 objects, where are the intersection 
points, what's the distance between the 2 objects, etc. (e.g. in the 
AABB tree component)

But I could not find a way to compute the intersecting volume. If I 
could get the intersection volume, I could compute what's the percentage 
of overlap. After doing some research, it appears that computing the 
volume of a polyhedron is not straightforward either...

Any suggestion would be appreciated.

Regards
Brice