Beside maintenance and customer support, LAStools will certainly need some updates and further development to remain competitive. We are currently working on the following tasks. New GUI LAStools is a fundamental element regarding LiDAR data processing, but the GUI is outdated. Young professionals require a more intuitive operation. Visualizing cloud points helps to understand about […]
Development and perspective Read More »
Around 86,000 square kilometres of the province of British Columbia have been mapped using LiDAR and these high-tech point clouds are now released as open data. More about these big news can be found here. We decided to take the portal for a quick spin and try to find the Computer Science building of UBC Vancouver
New „LidarBC“ Portal adds plenty of Precise Points to Open LiDAR in Canada, eh? Read More »
Olumese Efeovbokhan (recipient of another three LASmoons) Geosciences, School of Geography University of Nottingham, UK Background: Hydrological models require various input data for flood vulnerability mapping. An important input data for flood vulnerability mapping is the DTM over which flow is being routed. DTMs are generated using cartography, ground surveying, digital aerial photogrammetry, interferometric SAR
LASmoons: Olumese Efeovbokhan Read More »
In the last article about the Livox MID-40 LiDAR scan of Samara we quality checked the data, aligned the flight lines and cleaned the remaining spurious scan lines. In this article we will process this data into the standard products. A focus will be on generating a smooth „median ground“ surface from the „fluffy“ scanner
Generating DTM for „fluffy“ Livox MID-40 LiDAR via „median ground“ points Read More »
In March 2019 I was welcoming Nelson Mattie from LiDAR Latinoamerica to Samara who brought along his versatile Snoopy A-Series scanning system by LidarUSA that is based on the Velodyne HDL-32E scanner. We mounted it to his truck for a mobile scan of the core downtown block, Nelson carried it on his shoulder through „Samara Jungle“ for
Preparing Drone LiDAR from Snoopy by LidarUSA carrying a Velodyne HDL-32E Read More »
September 11th 2020 seemed like a fitting day to hunt down – with a powerful drone – those who destroy our common good. The latest DJI M300 RTK drone came to visit me in Samara, Guanacaste, Costa Rica and it was carrying the gAirHawk GS-MID40 UAV laser scanning system by Geosun featuring the light-weight Livox
Strip Aligning of Drone LiDAR flown with Livox MID-40 over destroyed Mangrove Read More »
My new favorite Swiss Miss, Viola Amherd, said today „Geodaten gehören heute zur Infrastruktur wie die Straßen und die Eisenbahn“, which says that „today, geodata are part of the infrastructure like roads and railways“. The federal councilor of Switzerland announced that programmers and planners, whether private or professional, can now download the data free of
After weeks of planning the helicopter finally came. Since we have been cooperating with Stereocarto’s San Jose office for quite some time, we were finally able to lure their helicopter down to Samara. Taking off from Liberia it flew about an hour back and forth across Samara and the adjacent beaches. Processing this data will
Scanning Samara with LiDAR and Images using Helicopter of Stereocarto Read More »
Leonidas Alagialoglou (recipient of three LASmoons) Multimedia Understanding Group, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Thessaloniki, GREECE Background: Canopy height is a fundamental geometric tree parameter in supporting sustainable forest management. Apart from the standard height measurement method using LiDAR instruments, other airborne measurement techniques, such as very high-resolution passive airborne imaging, have also shown to provide
LASmoons: Leonidas Alagialoglou Read More »
Zak Kus (recipient of three LASmoons) Topology Enthusiast San Francisco, USA Background: While LiDAR data enables a lot of research and innovation in a lot of fields, it can also be used to create unique and visceral art. Using the high resolution data available, a 3D printer, and a long tool chain, we can create
Martin Romain (recipient of three LASmoons) Marshall Islands Conservation Society Majuro, Republic of the MARSHALL ISLANDS Background: As a low-lying coastal nation, the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) is at the forefront of exposure to climate change impacts. RMI has a strong dependence on natural resources and biodiversity not only for food and income
LASmoons: Martin Romain Read More »
The municipality of São Paulo just dropped a MASSIVE amount of open LiDAR upon the geospatial community – a whopping 33 billion points. São Paulo city now has their own Entwine Point Tiles (EPT) service available for everyone interested in downloading, visualizing, or otherwise accessing this amazing data set. The EPT point cloud service can
Coco Loco for LiDAR: Open Data and 3D GIS Carnival Cruise into Sao Paulo Read More »
You have guessed correctly. This is mostly fake news as our „Freistaat“ (read „Free State„) of Bavaria continues to tightly guard all of its tax-payer funded geospatial basis data for no good reason. Our other „Free State“ – that of Thuringia – has become one poster child of open data in Germany with North Rhine-Westphalia
Surprise Release of Airborne LiDAR in Germany’s „Closed Data State“ Bavaria Read More »
UPDATE: As of January 30th also orthophotos and classified LAZ tiles are available for download. It took just a few years of nagging, a vulcanic eruption, and then a few more weeks of nagging but now it has happened. The Philippines have become the first country in Asia to offering LiDAR as open data for
The German state of Brandenburg has recently started to provide many of their basic geospatial data as open data, such as digital ortophotos in TIF and JPG formats, vertical and horizontal control points in gzipped XML format, LOD1 and LOD2 building models in zipped GML format, topographic maps from 1:10000 to 1:100000 in zipped TIF
Converting Rasters from inefficient ASCII XYZ to more compact LAZ or TIF Formats Read More »
Volga Lipwoni (recipient of three LASmoons) Department of Geography, School of Earth and Environment University of Canterbury, NEW ZEALAND Background: Structure from motion (SfM) photogrammetry, has emerged as an effective tool to accurately extract three-dimensional (3D) structures from a series of overlapping two-dimensional (2D) Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) images. The bid to switch from the
LASmoons: Volga Lipwoni Read More »
A while back we had a first look at the Single Photon LiDAR from Leica’s SPL100 sensor (that eventually turned out just to be an SPL99 because one beamlet or one receiver in the 10 by 10 array was broken and did not produce any returns). Today we are taking a closer look at a
Removing Noise from Single Photon LiDAR to Generate a Smooth DTM Read More »
We got a little note from Vítězslav Moudrý from CULS pointing out that the Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre Authority of the Slovak Republic has started releasing LiDAR as open data on their interactive Web portal. Congratulations, Slovakia!!! Welcome to the Open Data Party!!! We managed to download some data starting from this Web portal link and
Another European Country Opens LiDAR: Welcome to the Party, Slovakia! Read More »
Again and again we have preached about the importance of quality checking when you first get your expensive LiDAR data from the vendor or your free LiDAR data from an open data portal. The minimal quality check we usually advocate consists of lasinfo, lasvalidate, lasoverlap, and lasgrid. The information computed by these LAStools can reassure
Completeness and Correctness of Discrete LiDAR Returns per Laser Pulse fired Read More »
Finally some really good news out of Saxony. ? After North Rhine-Westphalia and Thuringia released the first significant amounts of open geospatial data in Germany in a one-two punch in January 2017, we now have a third German state opening their entire tax-payer-funded geospatial data holdings to the tax-paying public via a simple and very easy-to-use
Another German State Goes Open LiDAR: Saxony Read More »
Latvia, officially the Republic of Latvia, is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe has around 2 million inhabitants, a territory of 65 thousand square kilometers and – since recently – also a fabulous open LiDAR policy. Here is a list of 65939 tiles in LAS format available for free download that cover
Gabriele Garnero (recipient of three LASmoons) Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning Politecnico e Università degli Studi, Torino ITALY Background: Last spring, the LARTU research group produced a laser scanner survey of the Abbey of Sant’Andrea in Vercelli, on the occasion of the VIII centenary of the dedication (1219). The database produced
LASmoons: Gabriele Garnero Read More »
Recently a user of LAStools asked a question in our user forum about how to classify LiDAR data that contains lots of low noise. A sample screen shot of the user’s failed attempt to correctly classify the noise using lasnoise and the ground with lasground is shown below: red points are noise, brown points are
Removing Low Noise in LiDAR Points with Median Ground Surface Read More »
Nicolas Barth (recipient of three LASmoons) Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences University of California, Riverside UNITED STATES Background: The 850 km-long Alpine Fault (AF) is one of the world’s great laterally-slipping active faults (like California’s San Andreas Fault), which currently accommodates about 80% of the motion between the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates in the
LASmoons: Nicolas Barth Read More »
Olumese Efeovbokhan (recipient of three LASmoons) Geosciences, School of Geography University of Nottingham, UK Background: One of the vital requirements to successfully drive and justify favorable flood risk management policies is the availability of reliable data for hydrological modelling. Unfortunately, this poses a big challenge in data-sparse regions and has resulted in uncoordinated and ineffective
LASmoons: Olumese Efeovbokhan Read More »
Recently I came across this tweet containing the image below and it made me laugh … albeit not in the original way the tweet intended. The tweet was joking that „Anyone is able to open a GeoJSON file“ and included the Microsoft Word screen shot seen below as a response to someone else tweeting that
How Many Decimal Digits for Storing Longitude & Latitude? Read More »
We occasionally get permission to distribute a nice data sets and blog about how to best process it with LAStools because this gets around having to pay our „outrageous“ consulting fees. (-: This time we received a nice photogrammetric point cloud of the Tafawa Balewa Square in Lagos Island, Lagos, Nigeria. This area is part
Clean DTM from Agisoft Photogrammetric Points of Urban Scene Read More »
Recently we attempted to do a small LiDAR survey by drone for a pet project of our CEO in our „code and surf camp“ here in Samara, Costa Rica. But surveying is difficult when you are a novice and we ran into a trajectory issue. The dramatic „wobbles“ were entirely our fault, but fortunately our
Smooth DTM from Drone LiDAR off Velodyne HDL 32A mounted on DJI M600 UAV Read More »
We collected drone imagery of the restored „Kance“ tavern during the lunch stop of the UAV Tartu summer school field trip (actually the organizer Marko Kohv did that, as I was busy introducing students to SUP boarding). With Agisoft PhotoScan we then processed the images into point clouds below the deck of the historical „Jõmmu“ barge on the way
Using Open LiDAR to Remove Low Noise from Photogrammetric UAV Point Clouds Read More »
Recently we saw an interesting LiDAR data set talked about on social media by Chad Netto from Chustz Surveying in New Roads, Louisiana and asked for a copy. It is a LiDAR scan of a sugarcane plantation in Assumption Parish, Louisiana carried out with the VUX-1UAV by RIEGL mounted onto a RiCOPTER and guided by
No Sugarcoating: Sweet LiDAR from RiCOPTER carrying VUX-1UAV over Sugarcane Read More »
David Bandrowski (recipient of three LASmoons) Yurok Tribe Native American Indian Tribe in Northern California, USA Background: Wild spring-run Chinook salmon populations on the South Fork Trinity River in Northern California are near the brink of extinction. The South Fork Trinity River is the most remote and the largest un-dammed river in the State of
LASmoons: David Bandrowski Read More »
How to generate a clean Digital Terrain Model (DTM) from point clouds that were generated with the image matching techniques implemented in various photogrammetry software packages like those from Pix4D, AgiSoft, nframes, DroneDeploy and others has become an ever more frequent inquiry. There are many other blog posts on the topic that you can peruse as
Digital Pothole Removal: Clean Road Surface from Noisy Pix4D Point Cloud Read More »
A recent inquiry by Drone Deploy in the LAStools user forum gave us access to a nice photogrammetric point cloud for the village of Fillongley in the North Warwickshire district of England. They voted „Leave“ with a whopping 66.9% according to the EU referendum results by the BBC. Before we say “Good riddance, Fillongley!” we EU-abuse this
Scripting LAStools to Create a Clean DTM from Noisy Photogrammetric Point Cloud Read More »
Let’s heat up some sweet, warm and spicy Glögg in celebration! They must have been good boys and girls up there in Sweden. Because „Jultomten“ or simply ”Tomten” – how Sweden’s Santa Clause is called – is assuring a „God Jul“ for all the Swedish LiDAR lovers this Christmas season. Only a few weeks ago this tweet
In Sweden, all they Wanted for Christmas was National LiDAR as Open Data Read More »
One of our most popular (and controversial) blog articles was „Can You Copyright LiDAR„. It was written after we saw the then chief executive director at CyArk commenting “Sweeeet use of CyArk data” on an article describing the creation of a sugary fudge replica of Guatemala’s Tikal temple promoting a series of sugars by multinational agribusiness Tate
CyArk partners with Google, takes over „Don’t be Evil“ Mantra, opens LiDAR Archive Read More »
Sebastian Flachmeier (recipient of three LASmoons) UniGIS Master of Science, University of Salzburg, AUSTRIA Bavarian Forest National Park, administration, Grafenau, GERMANY Background: The Bavarian Forest National Park is located in South-Eastern Germany, along the border with the Czech Republic. It has a total area of 240 km² and its elevation ranges from 600 to 1453 m.
LASmoons: Sebastian Flachmeier Read More »
Small to medium sized LiDAR data sets can easily be published online for exploration and download with laspublish of LAStools, which is an easy-to-use wrapper around the powerful Potree open source software for which rapidlasso GmbH has been a major sponsor. During a workshop on LiDAR processing at CICESE in Ensenada, Mexico we learned that Guadalajara –
City of Guadalajara creates first Open LiDAR Portal of Latin America Read More »
We show how simple reordering and clever remapping of single photon LiDAR data can reduce file size by a whopping 50%. We also show that there is at least one Leica’s SPL100 sensor out there that should be called SPL99 because one of its 100 beamlets (the one with beamlet ID 53) does not seem to produce any
Scrutinizing LiDAR Data from Leica’s Single Photon Scanner SPL100 (aka SPL99) Read More »
At the beginning of July 2018 the Baltic country of Estonia – with an area of 45 thousand square kilometers inhabited by around 1.3 million people – opened much of their geospatial data archives and is now offering easy and free download of LiDAR point clouds nationwide via a portal of the Estonian Land Board. What is even
Estonia leads in Open LiDAR: nationwide & multi-temporal Point Clouds now Online Read More »
Maria Kampouri (recipient of three LASmoons) Remote Sensing Laboratory, School of Rural & Surveying Engineering National and Technical University of Athens, GREECE Background: The Aralar Natural Park, famous for its stunning landscapes, is located in the southeast of the province of Gipuzkoa, sharing a border with the neighboring province of Navarre. Inside the park there
LASmoons: Maria Kampouri Read More »
This tutorial serves as an example for a complete end-to-end workflow that starts with raw LiDAR flightlines (as they may be delivered by a vendor) to final classified LiDAR tiles and derived products such as raster DTM, DSM, and SHP files with contours, building footprint and vegetation layers. The three example flightlines we are using
Complete LiDAR Processing Pipeline: from raw Flightlines to final Products Read More »
Maeva Dang (recipient of three LASmoons) Industrial Building and interdisciplinary Planning, Faculty of Civil Engineering Vienna University of Technology, AUSTRIA Background: After centuries of urbanization and industrialization the green landscape of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil must be regenerated. The forests and other green areas, providers of ecosystem services, are fragmented and surrounded by dense urban
LASmoons: Maeva Dang Read More »
Alex S. Olpenda (recipient of three LASmoons) Department of Geomatics and Spatial Planning, Faculty of Forestry Warsaw University of Life Sciences, POLAND Background: The Bialowieza Forest is a trans-boundary property along the borders of Poland and Belarus consisting of diverse Central European lowland forest covering a total area of 141,885 hectares. Enlisted as one of
LASmoons: Alex S. Olpenda Read More »
The folks from Harris Aerial gave us LiDAR data from a test-flight of one of their drones, the Carrier H4 Hybrid HE (with a 5kg maximum payload and a retail price of US$ 28,000), carrying a Snoopy A series LiDAR system from LidarUSA in the countryside near Huntsville, Alabama. The laser scanner used by the Snoopy A series is a
New Step-by-Step Tutorial for Velodyne Drone LiDAR from Snoopy by LidarUSA Read More »
Three videos from a full day workshop on LiDAR processing at the Department of Earth and Space Sciences of the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India held in October 2017 that was organized by Dr. A. M. Ramiya who we thank very much for the invitation and for being
Three Videos from Full Day Workshop on LiDAR at IIST Trivandrum in India Read More »
Martin Buchauer (recipient of three LASmoons) Cartography & Geomedia Technology University of Applied Science Munich, GERMANY Background: Salt marsh areas provide numerous services such as natural flood defenses, carbon sequestration, agricultural services, and are a valuable coastal habitat for flora, fauna and humans. However, they are not only threatened by the constant rise of sea
LASmoons: Martin Buchauer Read More »
Last December we had a chance to visit the team of Dr. Stefan Hrabar at CSIRO in Pullenvale near Brisbane who work on a drone LiDAR system called Hovermap. This SLAM-based system is mainly developed for the purpose of autonomous flight and exploration of GPS-denied environments such as buildings, mines and tunnels. But as the SLAM algorithm
First Look with LAStools at LiDAR from Hovermap Drone by CSIRO Read More »
In this tutorial we are removing some „tricky“ low noise from LiDAR point clouds in order to produce a high-resolution Digital Terrain Model (DTM). The data was flown above a tropical beach and mangrove area in the Philippines using a VUX-1 UAV based system from RIEGL mounted on a helicopter. The survey was done as a test flight by AB
Removing Low Noise from RIEGL’s VUX-1 UAV LiDAR flown in the Philippines Read More »
Sebastian Kasanmascheff (recipient of three LASmoons) Forest Inventory and Remote Sensing Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, GERMANY Background: Forest inventories are the backbone of forest management in Germany. In most federal forestry administrations in Germany, they are performed every ten years in order to assure that logging activities are sustainable. The process involves trained foresters who visit each
LASmoons: Sebastian Kasanmascheff Read More »
Manuel Jurado (recipient of three LASmoons) Departamento de Ingeniería Topográfica y Cartografía Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, SPAIN Background: The availability of LiDAR data is creating a lot of innovative possibilities in different fields of science, education, and other field of interests. One of the areas that has been deeply impacted by LiDAR is cartography and in
LASmoons: Manuel Jurado Read More »
Chris J. Chandler (recipient of three LASmoons) School of Geography University of Nottingham, UNITED KINGDOM Background: Wetlands provide a range of important ecosystem services: they store carbon, regulate greenhouse gas emissions, provide flood protection as well as water storage and purification. Preserving these services is critical to achieve sustainable environmental management. Currently, mangrove forests are protected
LASmoons: Chris J. Chandler Read More »
Points clouds from UAVs have become a common sight. Cheap consumer drones equipped with cameras produce points from images with increasing quality as photogrammetry software is improving. But vegetation is always a show stopper for point clouds generated from imagery data. Only an active sensing technique such as laser scanning can penetrate through the vegetation
Processing Drone LiDAR from YellowScan’s Surveyor, a Velodyne Puck based System Read More »
Following the lead of England and Wales, the Scottish LiDAR is now also open data. The implementation of such an open geospatial policy in the United Kingdom was spear-headed by the Environment Agency of England who started to make all of their LiDAR holdings available as open data. In September 2015 they opened DTM and DSM
Scotland’s LiDAR goes Open Data (too) Read More »
PRESS RELEASE (for immediate release) October 2, 2017 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany At INTERGEO 2017 in Berlin, rapidlasso GmbH – the makers of the popular LiDAR processing software LAStools – were awarded top honors in both of the categories they had been nominated for: most innovative software and most innovative startup. The third award for most
LAStools Win Big at INTERGEO Taking Home Two Innovation Awards Read More »
Huaibo Mu (recipient of three LASmoons) Environmental Mapping, Department of Geography University College London (UCL), UK Background: This study is a part of the EU-funded Metrology for Earth Observation and Climate project (MetEOC-2). It aims to combine terrestrial and airborne LiDAR data to estimate biomass and allometry for woodland trees in the UK. Airborne LiDAR can
LASmoons: Huaibo Mu Read More »
Point clouds produced with dense-matching by photogrammetry software such as SURE, Pix4D, or Photoscan can include a fair amount of the kind of „low noise“ as seen below. Low noise causes trouble when attempting to construct a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) from the points as common algorithm for classifying points into ground and non-ground points –
Removing Excessive Low Noise from Dense-Matching Point Clouds Read More »
The biggest problem of generating a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) from the photogrammetric point clouds that are produced from aerial imagery with dense-matching software such as SURE, Pix4D, or Photoscan is dense vegetation: when plants completely cover the terrain not a single point is generated on the ground. This is different for LiDAR point clouds
Marzena Wicht (recipient of three LASmoons) Department of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and GIS Warsaw University of Technology, Poland. Background: More than half of human population (Heilig 2012) suffers from many negative effects of living in cities: increased air pollution, limited access to the green areas, Urban Heat Island (UHI) and many more. To mitigate some
LASmoons: Marzena Wicht Read More »
Gudrun Norstedt (recipient of three LASmoons) Forest History, Department of Forest Ecology and Management Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Umeå, Sweden Background: Until the end of the 17th century, the vast boreal forests of the interior of northern Sweden were exclusively populated by the indigenous Sami. When settlers of Swedish and Finnish ethnicity started to
LASmoons: Gudrun Norstedt Read More »
Muriel Lavy (recipient of three LASmoons) RED (Risk Evaluation Dashboard) project ISE-Net s.r.l, Aosta, ITALY. Background: The Aosta Valley Region is a mountainous area in the heart of the Alps. This region is regularly affected by hazard natural phenomena connected with the terrain geomorphometry and the climate change: snow avalanche, rockfalls and landslide. In July
LASmoons: Muriel Lavy Read More »
Some professionals in remote sensing find LAStools a useful tool to extract statistical metrics from LiDAR that are used to make estimations about a larger area of land from a small set of sample plots. Common applications are prediction of the timber volume or the above-ground biomass for entire forests based on a number of representative plots where
Plots to Stands: Producing LiDAR Vegetation Metrics for Imputation Calculations Read More »
LiDAR leaks have happened! Black helicopters are in the sky! A few days ago a tiny tweet leaked the online location of „classified LiDAR“ for Washington, DC. This LiDAR really is „classified“ and includes an aerial scan of the Pentagon. For rogue scientists world-wide we offer a secret download link. It links to a file code-named ‚pentagon.laz‘ that contains the 8,044,789 „classified“
Leaked: „Classified LiDAR“ of Pentagon in LAS 1.4 Format Read More »
In the first part of this series we downloaded, compressed, and viewed some of the newly released open LiDAR data for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. In the second part we look at how to merge the multiple point clouds provided back into single LAS or LAZ files that are as proper as possible. Follow along with
NRW Open LiDAR: Merging Points into Proper LAS Files Read More »
Chloe Brown (recipient of three LASmoons) Geosciences, School of Geography University of Nottingham, UK Background: Malaysia’s North Selangor peat swamp forest is experiencing rapid and large scale conversion of peat swampland to oil palm agriculture, contrary to prevailing environmental guidelines. Given the global importance of tropical peat lands, and the uncertainties surrounding historical and future oil
LASmoons: Chloe Brown Read More »
Elia Palop-Navarro (recipient of three LASmoons) Research Unit in Biodiversity (UO-PA-CSIC) University of Oviedo, SPAIN. Background: Old-growth forests play an important role in biodiversity conservation. However, long history of human transformation of the landscape has led to the existence of few such forests nowadays. Its structure, characterized by multiple tree species and ages, old trees
LASmoons: Elia Palop-Navarro Read More »
PRESS RELEASE (for immediate release) February 13, 2017 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany Just in time for ILMF 2017 in Denver, the makers of the popular LiDAR processing software LAStools announce that the prototype for the „native LAS 1.4 extension“ of their award-winning open source LASzip LiDAR compressor is ready for testing. An update to the
Prototype for „native LAS 1.4 extension“ of LASzip LiDAR Compressor Released Read More »
Jesús García Sánchez (recipient of three LASmoons) Landscapes of Early Roman Colonization (LERC) project Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, The Netherlands Background: Our project Landscapes of Early Roman Colonization (LERC) has been studying the hinterland of the Latin colony of Aesernia (Molise region, Italy) using several non-destructive techniques, chiefly artefactual survey, geophysics, and interpretation of
LASmoons: Jesús García Sánchez Read More »
The majority of LAStools users are processing airborne LiDAR. That should not surprise as airborne is by far the most common form of LiDAR in terms of square kilometers covered. The availability of LiDAR as „open data“ is also pretty much restricted to airborne surveys, which are often tax-payer funded and then distributed freely to
Pre-Processing Mobile Rail LiDAR with LAStools Read More »
The floodgates of open geospatial data have opened in Germany. Days after reporting about the first state-wide release of open LiDAR, we are happy to follow up with a second wonderful open data story. The state of Thuringia (Thüringen) – also called the „green heart of Germany“ – has also implemented an open geospatial data policy. This had already
Second German State Goes Open LiDAR Read More »
Rachel Opitz (recipient of three LASmoons) Center for Virtualization and Applied Spatial Technologies Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, USA Background: In Spring 2017 Rachel Opitz will be teaching a course on Remote Sensing for Human Ecology and Archaeology at the University of South Florida. The aim of the course is to provide students with the
LASmoons: Rachel Opitz Read More »
UPDATE: (March 6th): Second part „merging Bonn into proper LAS files“ This is the first part of a series on how to process the newly released open LiDAR data for the entire state of North Rhine-Westphalia that was announced a few days ago. Again, kudos to OpenNRW for being the most progressive open data state in Germany. You can follow
NRW Open LiDAR: Download, Compression, Viewing Read More »
UPDATE: (January 6th): Our new tutorial „downloading Bonn in LiDAR„. UPDATE: (January 9th): Now a second state went open LiDAR as well. UPDATE: (March 6th): New tutorial „merging Bonn into proper LAS files„ Kudos to OpenNRW for offering online download links for hundreds of Gigabytes of open LiDAR for the entire state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westfalen) as announced a few months
First Open LiDAR in Germany Read More »
Alen Berta (recipient of three LASmoons) Department of Terrestrial Ecosystems and Landscape, Faculty of Forestry University of Zagreb and Oikon Ltd Institute for Applied Ecology, CROATIA Background: After becoming the EU member state, Croatia is obliged to fulfill the obligation risen from the Kyoto protocol: National Inventory Report (NIR) of the Green House Gasses according to UNFCCC. One
LASmoons: Alen Berta Read More »
Stéphane Henriod (recipient of three LASmoons) National Statistical Committee of the Kyrgyz Republic Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan This pilot study is part of the International Climate Initiative project called „Ecosystem based Adaptation to Climate change in the high mountainous regions of Central Asia“ that is funded by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMU) of
LASmoons: Stéphane Henriod Read More »
At INTERGEO 2016 in Hamburg, the guys from Aerowest GmbH shared with us a small photogrammetric point cloud from the city of Soest that had been generated with the SURE dense-matching software from nFrames. We want to test whether – using LAStools – we can generate a decent DTM from these points that are essentially a gridded DSM. If this
Creating a Better DTM from Photogrammetic Points by Avoiding Shadows Read More »
Jane Meiforth (recipient of three LASmoons) Environmental Remote Sensing and Geoinformatics University of Trier, GERMANY Background: The New Zealand Kauri trees (or Agathis australis) are under threat by the so called Kauri dieback disease. This disease is caused by a fungi like spore, which blocks the transport for nutrition and water in the trunk and finally
LASmoons: Jane Meiforth Read More »
Patricia Andrade (recipient of three LASmoons) Earth Sciences Division CICESE, MEXICO Background: The relief in the northwest coast of Baja California is subject to different processes. One process that has a major impact are landslides. The near-shore landslides have been a significant problem because this area coincides with the location of the Tijuana-Ensenada Scenic highway which
LASmoons: Patricia Andrade Read More »
Jakob Iglhaut (recipient of three LASmoons) Program for Geospatial Information Management Carinthia University of Applied Sciences, Villach, AUSTRIA Background: As part of the EU LIFE programme two river stretches in Carinthia, Austria have recently been subject to restoration measures. The LIFE-project aims at protecting valuable riverine flora and fauna while improving flood protection. By remodelling the river
LASmoons: Jakob Iglhaut Read More »
Visiting our users on-site, such as last week at Mariano Marcos State University in Ilocos Norte in the Philippines, we sometimes come across situations as pictured below where the intensity values of the returns of one flightline are drastically different from that of other flightlines. Using intensity rasters with such dark strips as an additional input
Fixing Intensity Differences between Flightlines („quick and dirty“) Read More »
Asanga Ramanayake (recipient of three LASmoons) BGSU Remote Sensing Lab, School of Earth, Environment and Society Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA Background: Lake Erie is the Southern most of the Great Lakes and it is shared by 4 states and 2 countries. It is the shallowest, warmest, and most biologically productive of all the
LASmoons: Asanga Ramanayake Read More »
PRESS RELEASE (for immediate release) February 18, 2016 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany Just in time for ILMF 2016, the makers of the open LASzip LiDAR compressor annouce the latest addition to their LiDAR processing software LAStools. The new ‚laspublish‚ from rapidlasso GmbH creates stand-alone Web Portals for interactive 3D viewing of LiDAR points and for selective downloading of LAZ or LAS files.
New ‚laspublish‘ creates Web Portals for 3D Viewing and Downloading of LiDAR Read More »
A Digital Surface Model (DSM) represents the elevation of the landscape including all vegetation and man-made objects. An easy way to generate a DSM raster from LiDAR is to use the highest elevation value from all points falling into each grid cell. However, this „binning“ approach only works when then the resolution of the LiDAR is higher than the resolution
Generating Spike-Free Digital Surface Models from LiDAR Read More »
Andreas Konring and Susanne Bjerg Petersen (recipients of three LASmoons) Department of Environmental Engineering Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, DENMARK Background: Copenhagen has in the recent years experienced severe floodings due to cloudbursts which has increased the focus of climate adaption and the implementation of green infrastructure. The use of sustainable urban drainage system (SUDS) solutions
LASmoons: Andreas Konring and Susanne Bjerg Petersen Read More »
So your LiDAR processing workflow produces beautiful LAS or LAZ output. You think the files are nothing short of perfect. But they are in LAS 1.2 format and the tender document explicitly requests delivery in the latest LAS 1.4 format. The free and open source las2las module of LAStools – also known as the Swiss Army knife
Create proper LAS 1.4 files with LAStools (for free) Read More »
Geoffrey Ower (recipient of three LASmoons) School of Biological Sciences Illinois State University, Normal, USA Background: The spatial distribution and abundance of mosquitoes is important because biting mosquitoes can acquire and transmit pathogens such as viruses that infect humans or domestic animals. There have been 1,263 confirmed human infections with mosquito-borne West Nile virus in Illinois
LASmoons: Geoffrey Ower Read More »
The empire has not changed their evil ways, despite an encouraging email from ESRI’s founder and president Jack Dangermond in response to the Open Letter by the OSGeo that was delivered to ESRI, OGC, and the ASPRS. Facing an incredible backlash by the LiDAR community over the release of their „LAZ clone“ there was a new hope that unnecessary format fragmention could be avoided by working
The dArc Force Awakens: ESRI escalates LiDAR format war Read More »
Alejandro Hinojosa (recipient of three LASmoons) Earth Sciences Division CICESE, MEXICO Background: The Baja California peninsula in Mexico is a land feature drifting away from the continent due to tectonic plate movement leaving in its path scars of well-defined and studied faults system. An aerial LiDAR survey of the Agua Blanca fault corridor was collected by
LASmoons: Alejandro Hinojosa Read More »
PRESS RELEASE (for immediate release) November 16, 2015 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany At the Asian Conference on Remote Sensing 2015 (ACRS 2015) held in Manila, rapidlasso GmbH was honored with the „Green Asia Award“ by the Chinese Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (CSPRS). This award is given to a paper that directs Asia towards a greener future using remote sensing
Rapidlasso receives „Green Asia Award“ at ACRS 2015 Read More »
Raja Ram Aryal (recipient of three LASmoons) Photogrammetry and Geoinformatics University of Applied Sciences Stuttgart, GERMANY Background: Obtaining LiDAR-derived products like Digital Terrain Models (DTMs), Digital Surface Models (DSMs) and Canopy Height Models (CHMs) is a challenging task in steep forest areas. The Bavarian Forest National Park is an example of a steep terrain in central Europe.The national
LASmoons: Raja Ram Aryal Read More »
Kiti Suomalainen (recipient of three LASmoons) Energy Centre University of Auckland, New Zealand Background: Auckland enjoys 2050 hours of sunshine annually, comparable to Melbourne (2100) and Istanbul (2026), yet it is lagging behind in solar power installations. However, Auckland Council is committed to a sustainable pathway in mobility and energy consumption, aiming at solar photovoltaic (PV)
LASmoons: Kiti Suomalainen Read More »
At PhoWo and INTERGEO 2015 rapidlasso was spending quality time with VisionMap who make the A3 Edge camera that provides fine resolution images from high altitudes and can quickly cover large areas. Under the hood of their LightSpeed software is the SURE dense-matching algorithm from nframes that turns images into photogrammetric point clouds. We were asked whether LAStools is able to create bare-earth DTM rasters
Removing low noise from Semi-Global Matching (SGM) Points Read More »
Anu Kramer (recipient of three LASmoons) Stephens Lab, Fire Science Laboratory Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management University of California at Berkeley, USA Background: Large diameter trees are important to a wide variety of wildlife, including many species that are rare or endangered, such as the California Spotted Owl. LiDAR has been successfully utilized to
LASmoons: Anu Kramer Read More »
Tim Sutton and his team at Kartoza work on flood modelling and risk assessment using Inasafe. They have been trying to generate a DTM from point cloud data derived via dense-matching from UAV imagery collected by an eBee of SenseFly in the „unplanned developments“ or „slums“ North West of Dar es Salaam, the capital city of Tanzania. Tim’s team was stuck after „other software“
Creating DTMs from dense-matched points of UAV imagery from SenseFly’s eBee Read More »
PRESS RELEASE (for immediate release) September 14, 2015 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany Just in time for INTERGEO 2015, the Potree software was released in its latest 1.3 version. Potree is a WebGL based point cloud viewer for very large datasets. The Potree software allows to publish large LiDAR point clouds on the Web such that anyone can
Potree puts Big and Beautiful LiDAR in Your Browser Read More »
This article could also be titled „How not to implement a national open data policy for massive geospatial data sets“ or „Forget single-photon LiDAR, England already has single-quantum LiDAR“ … (-: You may have heard about the amazing open data release by the Environment Agency. So far LiDAR-derived DTM and DSM rasters have been released for 72% of the entire
England Releases National LiDAR DEM with Insane (!) Vertical Resolution Read More »
PRESS RELEASE (for immediate release) August 31, 2015 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany We are happy to announce that RIEGL Laser Measurement Systems, Austria has become a sponsor of the award-winning LASzip compressor. Their contribution at the Silver level will kick-off the actual development phase of the „native LAS 1.4 extension“ that had been discussed with the LiDAR community over
RIEGL Becomes LASzip Sponsor for LAS 1.4 Extension Read More »
Bastian Schumann (recipient of three LASmoons) Department of Remote Sensing and DLR German Aerospace Center University of Würzburg, GERMANY Background: The Bavarian Forest National Park is a protected area in the southeast of Germany, where forest stands are unmanaged and are subject to long-term undisturbed natural processes. Scientists have chosen this site to study ecological and environmental processes on
LASmoons: Bastian Schumann Read More »
PRESS RELEASE (for immediate release) August 17, 2015 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany The August release of LAStools from rapidlasso GmbH now also contains a toolbox for the latest 15.1 version of ERDAS IMAGINE® 2015 from Hexagon Geospatial. The two companies had announced their cooperation earlier this year after releasing the first version of a LiDAR processing toolbox based on LAStools for the 2014
LAStools Toolbox now also for ERDAS IMAGINE 2015 Read More »
We often process LiDAR in tiles for two reasons: first, to keep the number of points per file low and use main memory efficient, and second, to speed up the computation with parallel tile processing and keep all cores of a modern CPU busy. However, it is very (!!!) important to take the necessary precautions to avoid „edge artifacts“
Use Buffers when Processing LiDAR in Tiles !!! Read More »
Moreblessings Shoko (recipient of three LASmoons) School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics University of Cape Town, SOUTH AFRICA Background: Over one billion of the world’s population live in slums, lacking access to water, tenure, electricity, sanitation and basic services. Informal settlements are a growing challenge for urban governance especially in developing countries. These settlements not only thwart plans
LASmoons: Moreblessings Shoko Read More »
PRESS RELEASE (for immediate release) July 29, 2015 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany The paper “Generating Pit-free Canopy Height Models from Airborne LiDAR” co-authored by rapidlasso GmbH and published in the September 2014 issue of PE&RS (the journal of the ASPRS) was awarded twice at the IGTF 2015 – ASPRS Annual Conference in Tampa, Florida last May. The paper took home
Two ASPRS awards for „pit-free“ CHM algorithm Read More »
PRESS RELEASE (for immediate release) July 13, 2015 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany We are happy to announce that Trimble’s Geospatial Division has become a sponsor of the LASzip compressor. Their contribution as a Bronze sponsor will improve the existing „LAS 1.4 compatibility mode“ of LASzip whose creation and maintenance is already being supported by Gold sponsor
Trimble joins LASzip sponsors USACE, NOAA, and Quantum Spatial Read More »
The Open Letter by OSGeo was delivered to ESRI, OGC, and the ASPRS last week and the initial reponses – including an email from ESRI’s founder and president Jack Dangermond – are very encouraging. Attendees of last weeks‘ ASPRS conference were discussing how to respond to ESRI’s proprietary „Optimized LAS“ that threatens the achievements of the open LiDAR formats
Five Myths about LAS, LAZ, and „Optimized LAS“ Read More »
PRESS RELEASE (for immediate release) April 20, 2015 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany The latest product by rapidlasso GmbH – creators of LAStools and LASzip – is an open source tool aiming to liberate LiDAR points locked-up in proprietary „Optimized LAS“ – a highly controversial, closed LiDAR format. The new LASliberator can be downloaded here. It comes as both, a simple command line tool for
New LASliberator „frees“ LiDAR from Closed Format Read More »
An easy-to-follow video tutorial on LiDAR processing with LAStools recorded in two parts (1, 2) in Baja California on April 8th 2015 as part of a 3 day workshop at CICESE in Ensenada. It includes a presentation but is mostly a hands-on that you can follow after downloading LAStools. For the first part skip to the 45th minute (or use this direct link):
ultimate video hands-on for LiDAR with LAStools Read More »
PRESS RELEASE (for immediate release) April 8, 2015 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany The latest release of LAStools from rapidlasso GmbH contains a new toolbox for ERDAS IMAGINE®2014, allowing the users of Hexagon Geospatial’s powerful remote sensing software to utilize the popular rapidlasso LiDAR processing modules. The tools have been fully integrated into the software so that
LAStools Toolbox for ERDAS IMAGINE 2014 Released Read More »
PRESS RELEASE (for immediate release) March 9, 2015 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany The week after Easter is poised to see Latin America’s premier LiDAR event of 2015 when LAStools, CloudCompare, and OpenTopography converge for the 3 day NPAC 2015 workshop in CICESE in Mexico. Just across the US border (one hour South of Tijuana) lies the coastal town of Ensenada in Baja California where Dr. Alejandro
First LAStools Workshop in Latin America Read More »
Andrew Smith (recipient of three LASmoons) Advanced Diploma in GIS Applications Vancouver Island University, Victoria, CANADA Background: Forestry and natural resource development are a large part of British Columbia’s economy and tourism. BC has some of the largest areas of forest-covered land in Canada, and some of the toughest terrain, which makes it a great place
LASmoons: Andrew Smith Read More »
We are concerned about ESRI’s next moves in forcing yet another proprietary format into wide-spread deployment. Forwarded emails, retold conversations, and personal experiences suggest that sneaky tactics are being used to disrupt the harmony in open LiDAR formats that we have enjoyed for many years. Some time has passed since we broke the news about the proprietary „LAZ clone“ by ESRI. We were expecting the ASPRS to eventually comment on the issue. ESRI
The LAS format, the ASPRS, and the „LAZ clone“ by ESRI Read More »
Unscripted complications but lasnoise saves the day Running LAStools via QGIS and ArcGIS toolboxes More on forestry application and intro to lascanopy Power and ease of batch scripts (once written)
Full Day Course on Video: LAStools for Forestry Read More »
Director Patryk Kizny shows us – once more – aesthetically pleasing visuals in his latest short „REBIRTH„. Already known for turning high-dynamic range (HDR) imagery captured in historic buildings into a stunning piece of art with his earlier short film „The Chapel“, Patryk returns to the screens with a larger project that integrates both LiDAR and HDR images. His new 14 minute short film can be watched
Aesthetic LiDAR Art in „REBIRTH“ Read More »
Scanning forests with LiDAR is done to predict timber yield, estimate biomass, and monitor ecosystems. A detailed Digital Terrain Model (DTM) is needed to accurately compute forestry metrics such as tree height. For generating a DTM it is important to have enough “ground returns” that measure the elevation of the bare-earth for which the laser pulse needs to penetrate through the vegetation down to the forest floor and
Beautiful Full-Waveform LiDAR of a Tropical Rainforest Read More »
PRESS RELEASE (for immediate release) December 4, 2014 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany Just in time for ELMF 2014 in Amsterdam, rapidlasso GmbH and Carbomap Ltd. have teamed up to further the development of tools that better exploit full-waveform LiDAR for the forestry and carbon market. This partnership brings together many years of expertise in processing discrete and full-waveform LiDAR
Rapidlasso Teams Up with Carbomap Read More »
Policy makers in many countries are debating whether it is worthwhile to open their National LiDAR holdings – collected with tax-payer money – for free (or cheap) open access or whether they should continue to restrict access and charge potential users of the data to recoup expenses. Most would agree that hurdle-free, instant online access allows
Restricting Access to National LiDAR: Is it worth it? Read More »
[contributed by guest blogger Lars Forseth] Archaeologists are increasingly finding ALS/LiDAR useful for making better surveys of archaeological sites and monuments. This is also done where these sites are in danger of being developed, and thus destroyed, see i.e (Risbøl 2011; Gustavsen et al. 2013). Norwegian archaeologists at several county councils and museums have detected unknown
LiDAR heights of burial mounds and cairns Read More »
Friends of LASzip and LAZ, it has come to my attention (from more than one source) that a certain company East of LA has started to more aggressively promote their proprietary LiDAR format known as the „LAZ clone“ (more here, here, here and here but also read the comments) by approaching individual stake holders of the LiDAR community. Trying to
Keeping ESRI Honest Read More »
In literature you sometimes read „we generated a Canopy Height Models (CHM) and then did this and that“ without the process that was used to create the CHM being described in detail. One approach computes the CHM as a difference between DSM and DTM: create a DTM from the ground returns and a DSM from the first
Rasterizing Perfect Canopy Height Models from LiDAR Read More »
I came across an interesting blog article by Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne from the University of Vermont on how LiDAR return information can be used as a simple way to discriminate vegetated areas from buildings. He first computes a normalized first-return DSM and a normalized last-return DSM that he subtracts from another to highlight the vegetation. He writes „This is because
Discriminating Vegetation from Buildings Read More »
André Große-Stoltenberg (recipient of three LASmoons) Institute of Landscape Ecology University of Münster, Germany Background: The Genus Acacia inhibits some of the most invasive shrubs and trees worldwide. Acacia longifolia is an invasive species in Mediterranean ecosystems. In Europe, it is, for example, invading dune ecosystems in Southwest Portugal. Remote sensing can is a useful tool to
LASmoons: André Große-Stoltenberg Read More »
PRESS RELEASE (for immediate release) October 6, 2014 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany Just in time for INTERGEO 2014 in Berlin, rapidlasso GmbH has completed the first prototype that extends the LASzip LiDAR compressor to the new point types 6 to 10 introduced with the LAS 1.4 specification. Sponsored in part by NOAA, this upgrade introduces the
Rapidlasso Announces LASzip „Compatibility Mode“ For LAS 1.4 Read More »
[contributed by guest blogger Yuriy Czoli] If you want to use LAStools on a Mac running OS X you will have to do some preparations. This is a brief introduction to get you up and running with LAStools on a Mac in the terminal. You may have heard that you can use „Wine“ to run LAStools on
Using LAStools on Mac OS X with „Wine“ Read More »
Flying LiDAR in regions with frequent cloud cover presents a significant challenge. If flight plan constraints do not allow to stay below all of the clouds then some of them will be scanned from above. For denser clouds this often means that all of the laser’s energy gets reflected or absorbed by the cloud and no returns
Removal of Cloud Returns With a Coarse DTM Read More »
Putting aside for a moment our controversy with ESRI over their „uncool“ move to create yet another proprietary format whose only benefit is vendor lock-in (read this, this, or this for more on their „LAZ clone„), they do have some neat Web technology. And maybe not all hope is lost and we can rejoin our efforts for a single „native LAS
Realizing Open LiDAR with ArcGIS Online and LASzip Read More »
We at rapidlasso have long been big fans of the biomass and biodiversity work done by Greg Asner’s group and their Carnegie Airborne Observatory. They were, in fact, the earliest „power-users“ of the BLAST extension of LAStools and helped finding all the bugs when rasterizing billions of LiDAR points collected during large-scale surveys in the Amazon into Digital Elevation Models (DEMs)
Worldwide LiDAR of Rainforest Biomass for REDD+ Read More »
What is part of the LAStools distribution? Cross-sections and editing points with lasview Overview of LAStools capabilities Details on different LAStools modules LAStools Pipelines as ArcGIS and QGIS toolboxes Quality Checking LiDAR data
Six New Video Tutorials on LAStools Read More »
It is easy to generate Digital Surface Models (DSMs) from the point clouds generated by dense-matching photogrammetry. The blast2dem tool that is part of the BLAST extension of LAStools can seamlessly triangulate and raster up to 2 billion points. In an earlier blog article we showed how to also create Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) from photogrammetric points by combining lassort, lasground, and las2dem.
Processing Large Dense-Matching Point Clouds Read More »
On August 14th, Prof. David Pyle tweeted about raw LiDAR being publically available for the vulcanic island Nea Kameni and its little sibling Palea Kameni that are part of the Santorini caldera in Greece. A big „kudos“ to all those like Prof. Pyle who share raw LiDAR data online for all to download – be it for transparent research, as an open data
Preparing raw LiDAR for efficient (online) distribution Read More »
Anu Swatantran (recipient of three LASmoons) Department of Geographical Sciences University of Maryland, College Park, USA Background: Single photon LiDAR (SPL) is a promising new technology for measuring terrain and vegetation characteristics over large spatial scales. SPL is different from conventional LiDAR instruments because it operates in the visible wavelength (532 nm) and requires only one detected
LASmoons: Anu Swatantran Read More »
Point clouds from dense-matching photogrammetry are popular. Stored in the LAS format – or its compressed LAZ twin – these „near-LiDAR“ points are easily ingested into LiDAR processing software to, for example, generate a Digital Surface Model (DSM). „Can LAStools also create a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) from such data?“ is a question we often get asked by private email or via
Generating a DTM from Dense-Matching Photogrammetry Read More »
We at rapidlasso had finally the chance to meet Victor Olaya of Boundless who created the Processing framework (formerly know as Sextante) that is now integral part of QGIS. On the last day of the joint workshop organized by Dr. Lene Fischer at the Forest and Landscape department of the University of Copenhagen that saw 2 days
First ever LiDAR Processing Model in QGIS using LAStools Read More »
Asger S. Petersen (recipient of three LASmoons) Copenhagen, Denmark Partner & Consultant, Septima Background: The Danish Geodata Agency has acquired country wide LiDAR coverage. Approximately 1/4th of the country has been flown this spring and the GST has published preliminary classified point cloud data. There are a lot of people in the Danish geodata community who are very
LASmoons: Asger S. Petersen Read More »
The Geographic Information Section of the Government of La Rioja in Spain has integrated information about their „open LiDAR“ data with a WMS server allowing their users to easily find and download it. The WMS layer contains attributes for each tile that include download links to compressed LiDAR files in LAZ format or additional technical documents. Users can access this WMS service through
LiDAR downloads via WMS Read More »
This article is obsolete. Please see New Plugin: LAStools for ArcGIS Pro In what some may call a „good LAZ, bad zLAS“ routine, rapidlasso GmbH announces better integration of their LiDAR processing technology into ESRI’s ArcGIS platform with new and improved LAStools toolboxes. This comes merely two days after pranking ESRI with an April Fools‘ Day press release that
new „LAStools Production“ and „LAStools Pipelines“ for ArcGIS Read More »
PRESS RELEASE (April Fools‘ Day) April 1, 2014 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany In a positive spin of events, Esri and rapidlasso are announcing to join forces and together develop a LiDAR compressor for LAS 1.4 in open source avoiding unnecessary format fragmentation. Their new „LASeasy“ tool not only compresses but also optimizes LAS files for
Esri and rapidlasso develop joint LiDAR compressor Read More »
Recently I worked with LiDAR from an Optech Gemini scanner in the Philippines and with LiDAR from a RIEGL Q680i scanner in Thailand. The two devices scan the terrain below with a very different pattern: the Optech uses an oscillating mirror producing zig-zag scan lines, whereas the RIEGL uses a rotating polygon producing parallel scan lines.
Density and Spacing of LiDAR Read More »
Chris Dunn (recipient of three LASmoons) University of New England, Australia School of Environmental & Rural Science Background: Pseudomys oralis, commonly known as the Hastings River Mouse (HRM), is a native Australian rodent with a patchy current distribution throughout north-east New South Wales (NSW) and south-east Queensland (NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change [DECC], 2005).
LASmoons: Chris Dunn Read More »
Scott W. Anderson (recipient of three LASmoons) University of Colorado at Boulder, USA Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) Background: In September of 2013, a combination of atmospheric events conspired to produce immense volumes of rain over the Front Range of Colorado. Between September 9th and 15th, the region received as much as 18″ of
LASmoons: Scott W. Anderson Read More »
This tutorial describes how to manually edit LiDAR using the new inspection and editing functionality available in ‚lasview.exe‘ with the latest release of LAStools (version 140301). We will work with the familiar ‚fusa.laz‘ sample LiDAR data set from the LAStools distribution that was recently reported to have shown strange symptoms assumed to be side-effects of the LAZ
Tutorial: editing LAS or LAZ files „by hand“ with lasview Read More »
PRESS RELEASE February 14, 2014 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany As a sweet foretaste to ILMF 2014, the creators of LAStools, LASzip, and PulseWaves are announcing „LASlayers“ already on Valentine’s Day. The new functionality nicely complements their popular and widely-used LiDAR compressor making the compressed LAZ files editable for most practical purposes. LASlayers significantly reduce I/O load for writing modification to LAS
Warming up for ILMF 2014, rapidlasso puts lean yet plush „LASlayers“ on LiDAR Read More »
NEWSFLASH: update on Feb 5th and 6th and 17th (see end of article) The year 2014 shapes to be a fun one in which the LiDAR community will see some major laser battles. (-: First, ESRI starts a „lazer clone war“ with the open source community saddening your very own LAS clown here at rapidlasso with
clone wars and drone fights Read More »
Nifty! Am online Web viewer for LiDAR data in LAS or ASCII format that can load files from your local drive. Very handy in case you need to inspect or show off a LAS file but do not have any LiDAR viewer installed on your computer – especially in case it should run cross-platform in any browser
online Web viewer for LiDAR Read More »
PRESS RELEASE January 21, 2014 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany The creators of the widely-used open source LiDAR compressor LASzip are issuing a „Call for Input“ for extending the popular LAZ format to the new point types 6 to 10 that were introduced with the LAS 1.4 specification. Their LiDAR technology company rapidlasso GmbH invites all interested
Call for Input on Compression of LAS 1.4 Read More »
NEWSFLASH: update on Jan 7th, 12th, 19th, and Feb 7th (see end of article) Today I got an email from a LAStools user at NOAA pointing out a new entry in the ArcGIS 10.2 documentation of ESRI that mentions a *.zlas format for the first time. This may have been an oversight at ESRI since there
new compressed LAS format by ESRI Read More »
Recently rapidlasso GmbH gave a workshop on LiDAR processing with LAStools at SOPEC in Suva, Fiji following the 2013 Pacific GIS and RS user conference. In the exercises we used LiDAR from the Nadi and Ba basins that had been flown in early 2012 by Network Mapping using helicopters with funding from the World Bank. For checking
Recovering Flight Lines in Fiji Read More »
Eric van Rees, the editor of the Geoinformatics magazine, met with rapidlasso GmbH at INTERGEO 2013 in Essen to have a quick chat about LAStools, LASzip, and PulseWaves as well as our LiDAR processing toolboxes for ArcGIS and QGIS. In the three-page article we talk about the beginnings of rapidlasso’s software, about when and how the company got started, about
Geoinformatics magazine interviews rapidlasso Read More »
GRAFCAN has launched a new product based on LiDAR for the Canary Islands: a digital suface model (DSM) that is literally “on steroids”. It is a synthetic view (not image-derived) that lets the user intuitively understand the territory. The product combines standard hillshading with a height-based color-coding enabling the viewer to „see“ where the trees are taller and to
GRAFCAN launches „DSM on steroids“ Read More »
After accidentally finding Russian tanks in Polish forests I was curious to see if there was something else hiding under the forest canopy. Remember, I randomly picked a 500 by 500 meter LiDAR tile as example data to introduce a group of forestry students to LiDAR processing with LAStools during the ForseenPOMERANIA camp. After extracting ground points with „lasground.exe„, strange bumps appeared in the
locating German bunkers concealed by canopy Read More »
This is the final part of a three-part tutorial on how to use LAStools to implement a pipeline that (1) quality checks a newly received set of raw LiDAR flight strips, (2) tiles and prepares the LiDAR for subsequent exploitation, and (3) generates raster and vector derivatives from the LiDAR points such as DTMs, DSMs,
Tutorial: derivative production Read More »
This is part two of a three-part tutorial on how to use LAStools to implement a pipeline that (1) quality checks a newly received set of raw LiDAR flight strips, (2) tiles and prepares the LiDAR for subsequent exploitation, and (3) generates raster and vector derivatives such as DTMs, DSMs, building footprints, and iso-contours with
Tutorial: LiDAR preparation Read More »
In August and September of 2013, I spent several weeks in the woods of Poland teaching LiDAR processing with LAStools to four groups of forestry students as part of the ForseenPOMERANIA camp. Wanting to be locally relevant, I switched my usual training data for a 500 by 500 meter tile of LiDAR from nearby forest
finding Russian tanks in Polish forests Read More »
PRESS RELEASE October 7, 2013 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany Just in time for INTERGEO 2013, the creators of LAStools and LASzip have partnered with LIDAR Technology Co., Ltd. of Zhubei City, Taiwan as their first exclusive reseller for the Taiwanese market. The two companies decided to strengthen their ties after holding a successful LiDAR processing workshop together with over 60 attendees
rapidlasso selects LIDAR Technology Co. as first LAStools reseller Read More »
PRESS RELEASE September 30, 2013 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany At the code sprint following the FOSS4G 2013 conference, rapidlasso GmbH completed a toolbox that exposes the extensive LiDAR processing capabilities of the LAStools software suite within QGIS. QGIS (previously known as „Quantum GIS“) is a comprehensive desktop geographic information system that is free and open source software (FOSS). QGIS has seen
rapidlasso adds LAStools LiDAR processing toolbox to QGIS Read More »
This post is obsolete. Please see the updated blog entry: LAStools as QGIS plugin The more complex installation instructions are only relevant for older QGIS versions. Starting with QGIS 2.10 or newer you can skip directly to step 4 and disregard most of step 6: We had an ArcGIS LiDAR processing toolbox since April 2012 and now we have one
how to install LAStools toolbox in QGIS Read More »
PRESS RELEASE August 22, 2013 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany This week rapidlasso GmbH is exhibiting its LAStools LiDAR processing software in tropical Cairns (Australia) at the LiDAR Technologies 2013 conference that is emerging as the premier LiDAR event in Australia. This marks the first time that rapidlasso is acting as a sponsor with its own exhibition booth on the
Exhibiting at LiDAR Technologies 2013 Read More »
This article is obsolete. Please see New Plugin: LAStools for ArcGIS Pro In recent days more and more users are discovering the LAStools toolbox that adds powerful LiDAR processing capabilities to ArcGIS versions 9.3, 10.0, 10.2, and 10.2 allowing you to exploit your LiDAR data in the most sophisticated manner through the familiar toolbox interface (see
ArcGIS LAStools toolbox for LiDAR processing Read More »
It seems Leica and Optech may have come a bit under „crossfire“ (-: by the other big news (besides adding PulseWaves support to RiPROCESS) at the RIEGL LiDAR 2013 user conference in Vienna, namely the unveiling of the new LMS-Q1560 airborne laser scanner. Below you see the management team doing the ceremonial act. The specification looks great and will especially make those happy
new scanner cross examines terrain Read More »
PRESS RELEASE June 21, 2013 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany Just in time for the RIEGL LiDAR 2013 user conference, technology start-up rapidlasso GmbH has released an open data exchange format called „PulseWaves“ for storing full waveform LiDAR data. The new format has been in development since December 2011 through transparent discussions at http://pulsewaves.org that involved many stake holders. The result
Release of PulseWaves Full Waveform LiDAR Format Read More »
This is part one of a three-part tutorial on how to use LAStools to implement a pipeline that (1) quality checks a newly received set of raw LiDAR flight strips, (2) tiles and prepares the LiDAR for subsequent exploitation, and (3) generates raster and vector derivatives such as DTMs, DSMs, building footprints, and iso-contours with
Tutorial: quality checking Read More »
Kwanghun Choi (recipient of three LASmoons) Biogeographical Modelling Department, University of Bayreuth, Germany Complex TERRain and ECOlogical Heterogeneity (TERRECO) Background: Soyang lake is one of the biggest artificial reservoirs in Korea and used for drinking water, irrigation, and electricity production. A sustainable maintenance of water resources is important for a stable supply of these services.
LASmoons: Kwanghun Choi Read More »
UPDATE: The situation has changed. Make sure you also read this. A few weeks ago, I wanted to demonstrate how geometric compression can shorten download times for online dissemination of 3D archeological artifacts. The demo failed. My web page was gone. The web admin told me later that he had to delete it after receiving
Can you copyright LiDAR? Read More »
PulseWaves is a new exchange format for full waveform LiDAR data. Below you see a simple visualization of a small sample of full waveform LiDAR data exported from RIEGL’s RiProcess to the PulseWaves format via a prototype of the PulseWaves DLL interface. Illustrated in 3D are the waveforms of 50 pulses via a green to red
sneak peak at PulseWaves Read More »
PRESS RELEASE February 25, 2013 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany Technology start-up rapidlasso GmbH has published the details of their popular LASzip LiDAR compressor in the February 2013 issue of the ASPRS journal PE&RS – a Special Issue on National Scale 3D Mapping edited by Jason Stoker of the USGS. The LASzip compression technology squeezes ASPRS
LASzip Compression Details Published in PE&RS Journal Read More »
Salzburg is a beautiful city in December. The European LiDAR Mapping Forum coincided with the days when the „Krampus“ (= „Christmas monsters“) are roaming the Christmas markets in the old town to scare children and adults alike. One gave me a painful whipping in the legs with its leathery tail when I tried to protect
LASindex – spatial indexing of LiDAR data Read More »
PRESS RELEASE October 5, 2012 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany The new technology start-up rapidlasso GmbH will make its first trade show appearance at next week’s INTERGEO 2012 in Hanover, Germany. The creators of LAStools and LASzip are hosted at the booth of the European Space Agency (ESA) as participants of a business incubation program by
Creators of LAStools and LASzip Form New Company Read More »
After attending Silvilaser 2012 in Vancouver and giving a keynote on „The Story of LAStools“, I had a stop over in Halifax and drove a cute little Fiat 500 convertible on a perfect Indian summer fall day to UNB Fredericton where Patrick Adda had organized a half-day workshop on LiDAR Processing with LAStools. Here is
workshop at UNB Fredericton: LiDAR Processing with LAStools Read More »
My LiDAR consultancy is in the process of becoming a proper GmbH (German for LLC) that is being founded with support of the ESA BIC Bavaria, an incubation center for space-related business ideas. As of today rapidlasso GmbH has a new headquarter. We moved into an office near Munich that is part of the Anwendungszentrum
Often I get asked about the difference between las2dem.exe and blastdem.exe – the latter being part of the BLAST extension of LAStools. In the academic video from 2006 below, I outline the core technology details behind BLAST, which can seamlessly compute gigantic Delaunay Triangulations from billions of LiDAR points – using very little main memory.
LAStools‘ BLAST extension can process billions of LiDAR points Read More »
On my way to the FunGIS LiDAR workshop in Cairns, I stopped in Adelaide to visit Airborne Research Australia. Flinders University recorded my talk on the capabilities for LiDAR processing with LAStools. In this introduction I use a recent project in the Canary islands, Spain, in Spring of 2012 as the example. We created canopy
LiDAR processing with LAStools in the Canary islands Read More »
PRESS RELEASE April 26, 2012 rapidlasso consulting, Sommerhausen, Germany The creators of LAStools are the recipient of the 2012 Technology Innovation Award for LiDAR processing at the Geospatial World Forum in Amsterdam for LASzip – a lossless LiDAR compression software. With LASzip rapidlasso consulting provides a free, efficient, open-source solution for squeezing LAS files into
LASzip wins 2012 Geospatial World Forum Technology Innovation Award Read More »
Here is a video of my talk at ELMF 2011 on „LASzip: lossless compression of LiDAR data“. Airborne or mobile laser scanning technology (LiDAR) collects billions of xyz points that are typically stored in the LAS(er) format. LASzip is a lossless compressor to turn large LAS into smaller LAZ files. Encoding and decoding speeds are
LASzip: lossless compression of LiDAR data Read More »
