An Overview of 3D Data Content, File Formats and Viewers
Technical Report: isda08-002 Image Spatial Data Analysis Group National Center for Supercomputing Applications 1205 W Clark, Urbana, IL 61801 An Overview of 3D Data Content, File Formats and Viewers Kenton McHenry and Peter Bajcsy National Center for Supercomputing Applications University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL {mchenry,pbajcsy}@ncsa.uiuc.edu October 31, 2008 Abstract This report presents an overview of 3D data content, 3D file formats and 3D viewers. It attempts to enumerate the past and current file formats used for storing 3D data and several software packages for viewing 3D data. The report also provides more specific details on a subset of file formats, as well as several pointers to existing 3D data sets. This overview serves as a foundation for understanding the information loss introduced by 3D file format conversions with many of the software packages designed for viewing and converting 3D data files. 1 Introduction 3D data represents information in several applications, such as medicine, structural engineering, the automobile industry, and architecture, the military, cultural heritage, and so on [6]. There is a gamut of problems related to 3D data acquisition, representation, storage, retrieval, comparison and rendering due to the lack of standard definitions of 3D data content, data structures in memory and file formats on disk, as well as rendering implementations. We performed an overview of 3D data content, file formats and viewers in order to build a foundation for understanding the information loss introduced by 3D file format conversions with many of the software packages designed for viewing and converting 3D files.
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