<p>Unfortunately, I don't think it ever got officially documented, but PCL has a command line application to report the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hausdorff_distance" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Hausdorff distance</a> between two clouds. Try running <code>pcl_compute_hausdorff</code>. It's also available in the PDAL library (<a href="https://pdal.io/apps/hausdorff.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://pdal.io/apps/hausdorff.html</a>), where you would instead run <code>pdal hausdorff</code>.</p>

<p>Another common one is Chamfer distance (as described in <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.00603" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.00603</a>), though I'm not immediately aware of an implementation.</p>
Metric to compare two point clouds similarity
<p>What are some metrics or methods that are used widely to compare similarity of two point clouds objects ? ( Ex. It could be PCD file or PLY file).</p>

<p>I have searched in PCL library's document but not found. Googled it, found some research but they talk about new method not what is widely or already used.</p>

<p>Is there any basic method to compare similarity of point clouds ? Or even some function in PCL library that will do the job ?</p>