Abstract: A point cloud contains data points having coordinates that locate each data point in a coordinate system. Cell boundaries are defined in the point cloud and a unique index is assigned to each cell. The indexes of the cells are assigned to any of data point contained in a cell having the same index. The index data points can be accessed in a manner analogous to rasterized or gridded data while maintaining the arbitrary or random distribution associated with point clouds. The indexed point cloud can be further processed to achieve a scalable compression level, either losslessly by increasing redundancy in the point cloud data and/or by separating the point cloud data into relevancy bands, or by conventional lossy techniques, such as by exploiting the redundancies created in the point cloud data to represent the point cloud in a finite number of symbols.