Printing a building from its laser scanned exterior point cloud
Yes there are similar algorithms, but (afaik) not as ready to use programms. 
I wrote a bachelor thesis by my own, where i converted poind cloud datas of scanned surfaces into contour octrees. This based on the work of Laine (https://users.aalto.fi/~laines9/publications/laine2010i3d_paper.pdf) and the approach of using sparse voxel contour octrees, but instead of using polygons it used point clouds.
This way was intended to get fast, good approximated results for visualizing.

But there may be also other slower and more accurate algorithms. 

Btw. this question is not good placed in the 3D printing forum, because it is a question about data conversion.