SA currently has 3 cloud formats that it supports:
The standard point cloud format is the simplest and most generic format of point clouds. Each cloud point consists of nothing more than and XYZ position and an index. The cloud contains targeting offsets (applied to all included cloud points) and visual controls.
Scan Stripe Clouds were added to provide a missing piece of information necessary for meshing. In this format a transform representing the instrument probing direction is saved per scan stripe. Scan Stripe Clouds, therefore, contain slightly more information but are otherwise the same as Standard Clouds. For this reason Scan Stripe Clouds can be converted to Standard Clouds but Standard Clouds cannot be converted to Scan Stripe Clouds. Point Clouds are a collection of compressed point locations in a format that is optimized for working with large amounts of data.
A new "Cloud" format was added to facilitate geometry extraction. The new Cloud is an optimized structure to store point clouds and associated data. It is designed to handle large point cloud data sets efficiently. In addition Clouds compute a local normal with its points. This produces better feature extraction capabilities and has the added benefit of offering a superior display and lighting.
More information on Clouds can be found here.
Cross Section Clouds were added as a convenient way to process a cloud or group of clouds in cross sections. It provides access to a set of filtering controls and the cloud visualization tools for cross sections.