title: How to convert a .ply file to numpy array so that it could be used in python scikit-image?
body: <p>I have a 3-D image in a ply file format (cloud data). I wish to perform object segmentation thus I need to somehow convert it to numpy array and feed it into segmentation algoirthms. Since I am a newbie I am not sure how exactly I can do the conversion.
  Say I want to use <a href="http://scikit-image.org/docs/dev/api/skimage.segmentation.html#slic" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this algorithm</a>.</p>