pcl_visualization is a handy visualization feature if you are mostly working with PCL’s PointT format. Unfortunately, for some reason, the visualizer cannot be installed with the provided setup.py file. Hence, you need to make some modifications to it to make it work with certain versions of VTK if you plan on using the visualizer on Ubuntu.
My setup is Ubuntu 16.04. Note that you may have to make some adjustments to the command lines if you are running a different version.
The idea is uncomment certain parts of the “setup.py” file and modify a line such that pcl_visualization runs using the VTK version you have installed on your machine.
In my version of python-pcl, I uncommented line 561:
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ext_args['library_dirs'].append('/usr/lib') |
Included above:
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ext_args['include_dirs'].append('/usr/include/vtk-6.2') |
Note that I used “vtk-6.2” instead of “vtk-5.8” because that was the VTK available when I observed the directory contents in /usr/include/.
Lastly, I uncommencted line 625:
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Extension("pcl.pcl_visualization", ["pcl/pcl_visualization.pyx"], language="c++", **ext_args) , |
For reference purposes, I did not install PCL explicitly, but used the one that came default with ROS Kinetic.