which data structure is appropriate to query “all points within distance d from point p”

Question

I have a 3D pointcloud and I\'d like to efficiently query all points within distance d from an arbitrary point p (which is not necessarily part of the stored pointcloud)

Answer 1

VTK can help:

void vtkAbstractPointLocator::FindPointsWithinRadius ( double R, double x, double y, double z, vtkIdList * result )

Subclasses of vtkAbstractPointLocator contain different data structures for search acceleration: regular buckets, kd-trees, and octrees.