Realistic benchmarks for point cloud data management systems

Abstract

Lidar, photogrammetry, and various other survey technologies enable the collection of massive point clouds. Faced with hundreds of billions or trillions of points the traditional solutions for handling point clouds usually under-perform even for classical loading and retrieving operations. To obtain insight in the features affecting performance the authors carried out single-user tests with different storage models on various systems, including Oracle Spatial and Graph, PostgreSQL-PostGIS, MonetDB and LAStools (during the second half of 2014). In the summer of 2015, the tests are further extended with the latest developments of the systems, including the new version of Point Data Abstraction Library (PDAL) with efficient compression. Web services based on point cloud data are becoming popular and they have requirements that most of the available point cloud data management systems can not fulfil. This means that specific custom-made solutions are constructed. We identify the requirements of these web services and propose a realistic benchmark extension, including multi-user and level-of-detail queries. This helps in defining the future lines of work for more generic point cloud data management systems, supporting such increasingly demanded web services.