Using PCL on windows with VCPKG and CMake

This tutorial explains how to acquire Point Cloud Library on Microsoft Windows platforms using VCPKG.

For additional information how to use VCPKG, please see their documentation.

Last updated: 22. December 2021

Contents

• Using PCL on windows with VCPKG and CMake

  • Requirements

  • PCL’s dependencies

  • Install PCL for usage

  • Using dependencies installed with VCPKG in CMake projects

  • Find PCL using CMake

  • Install PCL dependencies for contributions

Requirements

Download VCPKG sources to eg. c:\vcpkg preferably by cloning their repository.

Navigate to c:\vcpkg in powershell and run

.\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat

This will download vcpkg.exe.

PCL’s dependencies

PCL’s required dependencies available on VCPKG are:

• Boost

• FLANN

• Eigen3

PCL’s optional dependencies available on VCPKG are:

• VTK - for visualization module

  • Feature OpenGL - required

  • Feature Qt - optional for QVTK, used in apps

• GLEW - for simulation module

• Qhull - for convex/concave in surface module

• Qt - for apps that use Qt for GUI

• Google Test - for unit tests

• Google Benchmark - for benchmarks

• OpenNI2

• Realsense2

• PNG - for a single openni app

• Pcap - for Velodyne HDL driver

PCL’s optional dependencies not on VCPKG

• CUDA - only a port that verify its installed (version 10.1).

• GLUT

• OpenNI

• Ensenso

• davidSDK

• DSSDK

• RSSDK

Install PCL for usage

Running the following command in powershell in the VCPKG directory, will install PCL with default options as well as default triplet type (ie. x86).

./vcpkg install pcl

Note

This will build executables 2 times in release mode, as default host triplet is x64-windows on most modern PC systems, but vcpkg install x86 by default. So to fix it you can set host-triplet same as default triplet.

./vcpkg install pcl –host-triplet x86-windows

Or, you can use same custom triplet for both –triplet and –host-triplet

./vcpkg install pcl –triplet <same_custom_triplet_type> –host-triplet <same_custom_triplet_type>

Note

If there are new features or bugfixes that are not yet part of a release, you can try to use –head, which downloads the master of PCL.

You can see the available PCL version and options in VCPKG here.

To enable specific features, you need to write:

./vcpkg install pcl[qt,vtk]

And all features:

./vcpkg install pcl[*]

Note

If you want to use anything from the PCL visualization module (like the PCLVisualizer for example), you need to explicitly request this from vcpkg by ./vcpkg install pcl[visualization] or ./vcpkg install pcl[*] (it is disabled by default).

If you want to install with a different triplet type, the easiest way is:

./vcpkg install pcl –triplet triplet_type

ie.

./vcpkg install pcl –triplet x64-windows

This will acquire all the dependencies, build them and place the binaries in vcpkg/installed/triplet_type/bin for release and vcpkg/installed/triplet_type/debug/bin for debug.

Using dependencies installed with VCPKG in CMake projects

Use CMake to configure projects and remember to pass vcpkg\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake as toolchain file to enable CMake to find all the dependencies installed with VCPKG.

See example below using the cmake window:

Fig 1. Cmake configuration

Fig 2. Cmake configuration with vcpkg tool chain

Find PCL using CMake

To use PCL in CMake project, take a look at Kunal Tyagi’s minimal example in this repository

Note

You may get errors when your program is linked if you use specific point types that are not used so often (so for example pcl::PointXYZ and pcl::PointXYZI are usually not affected). Of course, the first thing you should check is whether you correctly link to all PCL libraries (target_link_libraries(<my_executable> ${PCL_LIBRARIES}) in CMake). The next thing you can try is adding #define PCL_NO_PRECOMPILE before including any PCL headers. The background is that on Windows, PCL is always compiled with PCL_ONLY_CORE_POINT_TYPES enabled, otherwise some PCL modules (e.g. pcl_features) would fail to build due to limitations of the Windows linker. The effect is that the templated classes are only instantiated for some commonly used point types, not for all. For further explanations, see the Adding your own custom PointT type tutorial.

Install PCL dependencies for contributions

If you want to contribute to PCL, the easiest way to get dependencies using vcpkg is to run the install command from our docker file

./vcpkg install dependencies_here –triplet triplet_type

Remember to omit the –clean-after-build, as this removes the source code of the dependencies and limit debugging capabilities for those.

To build PCL, you would have to get the source, preferably clone it using git.

Use CMake to configure PCL.