Capturing data from realsense D435: exporting coloured depth to .ply leads to a strange .ply file which cannot be converted in organized PC (.pcd) afterwards. First i open the file with meshlab and export mesh in ascii format:

[umale]

@MartyG​ I have written some code in order to capture data from the aforementioned device. At this point

... auto depth = frames.get_depth_frame(); points = pc.calculate(depth); auto color = frames.get_color_frame(); pc.map_to(color);   ... const string st ="filename.ply"; points.export_to_ply(st.c_str(), color);

After saving the point cloud (and manually setting faces equal to zero), i see this:

ply format ascii 1.0 comment pointcloud saved from Realsense Viewer element vertex 664972 property float x property float y property float z property uchar red property uchar green property uchar blue element face 0 property list uchar int vertex_index end_header -1.36699 -0.806493 1.492 142 154 160 255 -1.36653 -0.807575 1.494 142 154 160 255 -1.36881 -0.810277 1.499 142 154 160 255 -1.36834 -0.811358 1.501 142 154 160 255 -1.36786 -0.812439 1.503 142 154 160 255 -1.36738 -0.813521 1.505 142 154 160 255 -1.36689 -0.814602 1.507 142 154 160 255 -1.36458 -0.814602 1.507 142 154 160 255 -1.36047 -0.813521 1.505 142 154 160 255 -1.35636 -0.812439 1.503 142 154 160 255 -1.35045 -0.810277 1.499 142 154 160 255 -1.34366 -0.807575 1.494 142 154 160 255 -1.33958 -0.806493 1.492 142 154 160 255 -1.33371 -0.804331 1.488 142 154 160 255 -1.32517 -0.800547 1.481 142 154 160 255 -1.31932 -0.798385 1.477 142 154 160 255 -1.3135 -0.796223 1.473 142 154 160 255 -1.30946 -0.795142 1.471 142 154 160 255 -1.30543 -0.794061 1.469 142 154 160 255 .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ....

I can visualize the pointcloud via meshlab. but when i use the standard ply2.pcd(https://github.com/PointCloudLibrary/pcl/blob/master/tools/ply2pcd.cpp) function in order to convert it to pcd i got this error:

PCD output format: binary [pcl::PLYReader] new.ply:15: parse error [pcl::PLYReader::read] problem parsing header! [pcl::PLYReader::read] problem parsing header! > Loading new.ply user@awa-51212:~/user/tmp/

The same comes up even if i use the ascii output format.

One thing that i have noticed is that, in vertices' field i got 7 columns whereas the default is 6.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[MartyG · Accepted solution]

You may have more luck if you skip the ply export stage and instead use the SDK's PCL wrapper linked to below to convert RealSense data into PCL. A user suggested that "Once you are in PCL then you can convert to PCD".

https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense/tree/master/wrappers/pcl