Interestingly, SDFs have also become a widely used tool for analysis of 3D sensors such as lidar and RGBD (kinect, realsense). Specifically, truncated SDF's, wh

Interestingly, SDFs have also become a widely used tool for analysis of 3D sensors such as lidar and RGBD (kinect, realsense). Specifically, truncated SDF's, which put an upper limit on the magnitude of function, which helps with outliers and makes the representation sparser. They're a nice way to summarize noisy range measurements in a way that makes it easy to extract surfaces for visualization/further processing. The technique has been out there for a while, going at least back to Curless' space carving paper in the 90s [1], but kinect fusion [2] made it a lot more popular in recent years. [1] https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/volrange/volrange.pdf https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/volrange/volrange.pdf [2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/kinectfusion-real-time-3d-reconstruction-and-interaction-using-a-moving-depth-camera/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/kinectf...