A Tip for Installing Point Cloud Library 1.7.2 + Visual Studio 2012 in X64 Machine

Point Cloud Library (PCL) is a convenient SW library for 3D point cloud data processing. It is like OpenCV for 3D data. However, in recent time, installing PCL library for Windows becomes less straightforward. The current all-in-one windows builds in PCL library main webpage (http://pointclouds.org/downloads/windows.html) only support the obsolete versions of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and 2008. These two Visual Studio releases can't be found from Microsoft webpages any more.

Thanks to the work of unanancyowen.com (http://unanancyowen.com/?p=1255&lang=en), all-in-one builds of PCL 1.7.2 with Visual Studio 2012/2013/2015 are provided. However, after I downloaded the build for Visual Studio 2012 + X64 and installed it, Cmake of my PCL project complained that VTK library required by PCL can't be found. In case that you met with the similar issue, PCLConfig.cmake file in C:\Program Files\PCL 1.7.2\cmake directory needs to be modified to solve this issue. The modification is like below:

macro(find_VTK)

  if(PCL_ALL_IN_ONE_INSTALLER AND NOT ANDROID)

    #set(VTK_DIR "${PCL_ROOT}/3rdParty/VTK/lib/vtk-5.8")

    set(VTK_DIR "${PCL_ROOT}/3rdParty/VTK/lib/cmake/vtk-6.2")

  elseif(NOT VTK_DIR AND NOT ANDROID)

    set(VTK_DIR "C:/Program Files/VTK/lib/cmake/vtk-6.2")

  endif(PCL_ALL_IN_ONE_INSTALLER AND NOT ANDROID)

The original PCL cmake points to VTK version 5.8. But since the installed VTK build is actually version 6.2, in order to find valid cmake file for VTK, PCLConfig.cmake needs to point to the new location: "C:\Program Files\PCL 1.7.2\3rdParty\VTK\lib\cmake\vtk-6.2". After making this change, Cmake for my PCL projects starts to work.