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§ 01About

About the book and the author

A modern terrestrial laser scanner can produce two million range measurements every second. By the end of a working day it has handed back a file with several hundred million points and no indication of which of them describe the cathedral wall, which describe the scaffolding the surveyor walked past, and which are noise from a pigeon that crossed the beam.

From the opening of Chapter 1

§ 02The book

3D Point Cloud Processing is a reference for the field. Nineteen chapters, thirty-five algorithms with pseudocode, and original figures built from real survey data. It is written for graduate students, engineers, and researchers who want to read the field as it actually is, not as a vendor markets it. The text is in its final stage of writing, and chapters appear here as they are finished.

The platform you are reading is the book's home. Four chapters free to read in full, a companion video course in production, a dashboard for readers, and a path into the live cohort when you want to take it deeper. The cohort runs on Maven. Everything else lives here.

§ 03By the numbers

19
Chapters
5
Parts
35
Algorithms with pseudocode
4
Chapters free to read
22
Videos planned
3
Years in writing

§ 04The author

Abderrazzaq Kharroubi

Abderrazzaq Kharroubi is a geomatics and surveying engineer at the University of Liège, working with LiDAR and 3D point clouds across applications from cultural heritage to powerline corridor inspection.

He has taught more than two thousand students online and writes about the field for an audience of twelve thousand professionals on LinkedIn. The book is his attempt to put the working knowledge of the last decade of the field into a single durable reference.

§ 05How the book is written

Every chapter follows the same structure: the idea first, then the mathematics, then practical guidance. Every algorithm is explained visually before any equation appears. Classical and modern methods sit side by side because in practice you need both.

The notation is consistent across all nineteen chapters. Vectors are lowercase bold, matrices uppercase bold, point clouds use a dedicated symbol. You can open any chapter and know what every symbol means.

§ 06Citation

@book{kharroubi2026pointclouds,
  title  = {3D Point Cloud Processing: Sensors, Algorithms and Applications},
  author = {Kharroubi, Abderrazzaq},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://pointcloudprocessing.org}
}