Now point-based computer graphics is a vigorous research area. There are a lot of works have been devoted to the efficient representation, modeling, processing, and rendering of point-sampled geometry. Why?
1) Its simplicity
2) The 3D digital photography and 3D scanning systems use huge point samples.
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The Pointshop3D open-source software
[url]http://graphics.ethz.ch/pointshop3d/[/url]

 

Point-based graphics have a huge potential for future research and development and might influence the way we will do computer graphics in the future.

 

The workflow of point-based graphics:
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Points: they generalize pixels and voxels toward irregular samples of geometry and appearance. They carry all attributes needed for processing and rendering. There is no distinction between vertex and fragment anymore.
Lucky or unlucky?
Lucky: design leaner graphics pipelines(simpler computation)
Unlucky: need fill hole and need denser sampling
In some sense, bandwidth has to be traded with processing speed.

 

Points natrually serve as the canonical representation for 3D acquisition systems. They are lack of topology and connectivity, which is strength and weakness at the same time.

 

Points have proven their ability to model complex geometry.

 

In summary, point primitives constitute a simple and versatile low-level graphics and visualization primitive. Representation points have different strengths and weaknesses compared to other graphics primitives. They are not going to replace the existing ones, but have proven their ability to complement them. Many technical issuses related to point-based graphics boil down to reconstruction and resampling. As a sample-based approach to graphics, points stimulate us to take a signal processing view onto graphics and visualization.