pcwrite

Starting in R2026b, pcwrite is available in Point Cloud Toolbox™. In releases R2026a and before, pcwrite is available in Computer Vision Toolbox™.

You can now write a pointCloud object with a Color property of data type uint8, uint16, single, or double to a PLY or PCD file. In previous releases, the valid data types for the Color property depends on the file format you write to.

Valid Color Data Types

The default value of the encodingType argument is now "binary" for PLY files and "compressed" for PCD files. Before R2026a, the default value is "ascii" for both file formats.

In most cases, you do not need to make any changes to your code. However, if you specifically want to write point cloud data to a PLY or PCD file with ASCII encoding, you must specify the encodingType argument as "ascii", as shown in this command: pcwrite(ptCloud,"sample.ply",Encoding="ascii").

When you use the pcwrite function with the default encoding type, the function shows improved performance. When you use the pcread function to read a file generated by the pcwrite function, the pcread function also shows improved performance. The performance improvement increases as the number of points stored in the point cloud increases. For example, writing and then reading a point cloud using this code is about 17x and 11x faster, respectively, than in the previous release.

function [tWrite,tRead] = timingTest
    % Create a large point cloud
    rng("default");
    N = 1e6; % Number of points

    x = -50 + 100*rand(N,1);        % range [-50, 50]
    y = -50 + 100*rand(N,1);        % range [-50, 50]
    z = 10*rand(N,1);               % range [0, 10]

    ptCloud = pointCloud([x y z]);

    % Measure execution time of the operations
    tWrite = timeit(@()pcwrite(ptCloud,"temp.ply"));
    tRead = timeit(@()pcread("temp.ply"));
end

This table shows the approximate execution times required to write and read point cloud data to and from a PLY file.

The code was timed on a Debian^® 12, Intel^® Xeon^® CPU W-2133 @ 3.60 GHz test system by calling the function timingTest.