# filters.sample¶

The Sample Filter performs Poisson sampling of the input PointView. The The practice of performing Poisson sampling via “Dart Throwing” was introduced in the mid-1980’s by [Cook1986] and [Dippe1985], and has been applied to point clouds in other software [Mesh2009].

The sampling can be performed in a single pass through the point cloud. To begin, each input point is assumed to be kept. As we iterate through the kept points, we retrieve all neighbors within a given radius, and mark these neighbors as points to be discarded. All remaining kept points are appended to the output PointView. The full layout (i.e., the dimensions) of the input PointView is kept in tact (the same cannot be said for filters.voxelgrid).

filters.decimation and filters.voxelgrid also perform decimation.

Default Embedded Stage

This stage is enabled by default

## Options¶

A strategy for merging points skipped by a ‘where’ option when running in standard mode. If true, the skipped points are added to the first point view returned by the skipped filter. If false, skipped points are placed in their own point view. If auto, skipped points are merged into the returned point view provided that only one point view is returned and it has the same point count as it did when the filter was run. [Default: auto]