Method for 3D visualization of sensor data

Abstract The invention pertains to a computer-implemented method (100) for visualizing sensor data in a three dimensional virtual representation of a terrain that has 5 multiple surface layers, the method comprising, in a computing device, receiving (110) terrain data comprising information about the multiple surface layers, receiving (120) at least one point cloud comprising a multitude of data points, each data point comprising three-dimensional 10 coordinates in relation to the terrain and one or more sensor data values, performing a pre-processing procedure (140) and visualizing (180) the sensor data in at least a part of the virtual representation of the terrain, wherein the pre-processing procedure comprises generating a three 15 dimensional mesh as the virtual representation based on the terrain data, dividing the mesh into a multitude of tiles, each tile having at least three corners, each of the corners being shared with one or more neighbour tiles, calculating a projection direction for each tile corner, 20 and calculating a projection direction for each tile based on the projection directions of the tile's corners, wherein visualizing the sensor data comprises, for each tile in the part of the virtual representation of the terrain, projecting a visual attribute into the tile using the 25 projection direction of the tile and a projection volume of the data point, the visual attribute representing a sensor data value of a data point; and displaying the tile with the projected visual attribute. (Fig. 3a) aca a) I a 2) 0 L (D = ,~- I(D oo co