How to tune the meshing of point cloud effectively in rtabmap

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I have a point cloud that I want to mesh using rtabmap standlaone utility. I load the data with

rtabmap ~/.ros/rtabmap.db

In rtabmap I engage the following steps

• Regenerate clouds
• Cloud filtering
• Cloud smoothing
• Meshing

To learn the impact of the parameters and to tune the parameters, I set a specific combination of parameters and create the mesh. But I find it cumbersome to wait for the entire mesh to be generated every time.

Ideally, I will only load a small specific section of the point cloud and apply this procedure.

The only way that I know of, to load the data is by opening the database rtabmap.db

I'm thinking of the following alternative:

1. Load the database rtabmap.db once
2. Export from rtabmap into a model.ply file, then open the point cloud with e.g. meshlab and discard all the points expect for a certain area1, and export into a filtered point cloud file
3. In rtabmap, load the filtered point cloud file to work with much smaller dataset.

Is such thing, or similar approach possible?

This question also relates to my other question on how to decouple the steps to simplify the tuning of meshing parameters.

Thanks,

Avner