Point cloud databases

László Dobos, István Csabai, János M. Szalai-Gindl, Tamás Budavári, Alexander S. Szalay

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

We introduce the concept of the point cloud database, a new kind of database system aimed primarily towards scientific applications. Many scientific observations, experiments, feature extraction algorithms and large-scale simulations produce enormous amounts of data that are better represented as sparse (but often highly-clustered) points in a k-dimensional (κ ≲ 10) metric space than on a multidimensional grid. Dimensionality reduction techniques, such as principal components, are also widely-used to project high dimensional data into similarly low dimensional spaces. Analysis techniques developed to work on multi-dimensional data points are usually implemented as in-memory algorithms and need to be modified to work in distributed cluster environments and on large amounts of disk-resident data. We conclude that the relational model, with certain additions, is appropriate for point clouds, but point cloud databases must also provide unique set of spatial search and proximity join operators, indexing schemes, and query language constructs that make them a distinct class of database systems.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSSDBM 2014 - Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Print)9781450327220
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Event26th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management, SSDBM 2014 - Aalborg, Denmark
Duration: Jun 30 2014Jul 2 2014

Publication series

NameACM International Conference Proceeding Series

Conference

Conference26th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management, SSDBM 2014
Country/TerritoryDenmark
CityAalborg
Period6/30/147/2/14

Keywords

  • Multi-dimensional database
  • Proximity join
  • Spatial indexing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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