Multi ray photogrammetry and dense matching techniques also for aerial mapping or urban mapping (look at the project http://www.di.ens.fr/pmvs/). For small objects you can use structured light scanners (see David 3D scanner), active 3D camera (time of flight), passive 3D camera (plenoptic camera, as Lytro or Raytrix), other passive sensors such as Kinect with the Scenect software.

Do you really want point clouds, or data with which to generate H-resolution DEMs and or surface models?

Stereo imagery provide for 3D mapping of point cloud data from dense matching techniques i.e, scale-space like derivatives of salient objects resulting in automatic matching of overlapping locations and estimation of their resulting parallax to create 3D models. Check out the image-based 3D modeling with AGISoft PhotoScan (http://www.agisoft.ru/). We have an education priced version (about $500 vs $3K) that is very useful. Similar software are used with companies like SenseFly (http://www.sensefly.com/home.html) that automatically derive DEMs from UAVs. Additionally, you can use Photosynth to generate similar point clouds from your photos, however, as I recall, you cannot extract the point clouds, but it is free, and online (http://photosynth.net/).

Disclosure: I do not work for any of these organizations.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the great enlightenment on this matter.

Can you see attributes in point cloud data using ERDAS Imagine 2013?

Without a doubt, multi ray photogrammetry that it is included in some photogrammetric software, like BAE Systems NGATE or Inpho Match-T.

You can obtain additional information about these methodologies in:

http://www.ifp.uni-stuttgart.de/publications/phowo07/330DeVenecia.pdf

With respect of your question of the data attributes ... in which format do you have the points? There is a lot of different formats, for example, LAS format is very adequate for data cloud storage and the format includes additional information about any point.

Using the industry LAS format.

Using LAS format the information must be available. If you have any problem you can use some of the LAS data free viewers, for example, Fugro or the Lastools suite.

See also VisualSFM, we are using this software to generate point clouds from image sequnces (http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~ccwu/vsfm/)

Some extra resources. Leading on from Geoffrey's point, Photosynth can output point cloud and camera pose data which can be used as the input for dense stereo matching (i.e. via pmvs2 / cmvs: one of the multiview stereo toolchains available via VisualSFM). Find a link to Henry Astre's toolkit for this below for doing this:

http://www.visual-experiments.com/2012/05/23/photosynthtoolkit-11/

Michal Jancosek's CMP-MVS is another option available for dense matching (also available through VisualSFM). It is slower than pmvs2, though the results can be very impressive (see below)!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUDgDADXr6U

Thanks for the answers.

Dear Nashon,

As  Geoffrey  said use photogrammetry for the generation of 3D point cloud. Please check the attached file for 3D modeling. it is a  part of a final year project in surveying engineering for one of my student. The title of the project is: 3D mapping for small areas using close range photogrammetry.

Regards,

Gamal