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is a simple yet fast LiDAR visualization tool that has a number of neat little tricks that may surprise you. It can also edit the classification of the points as well as delete them. For more details see the README file. 2021-10-22

is a simple yet fast LiDAR visualization tool that has a number of neat little tricks that may surprise you. It can also edit the classification of the points as well as delete them. For more details see the README file. 2021-10-22

A simple open source tool with LGPL 2.1 license to validate whether a single or a folder of LAS or LAZ files conform to the LAS specification of the ASPRS. If something goes wrong during your LiDAR processing with LAStools it is good to run a lasvalidate check before asking a question in the LAStools user forum as the validation report will

computes the elevation of the LiDAR at certain x and y control point locations and reports the difference in respect to the control point elevation. The tool reads LiDAR in LAS/LAZ/ASCII format, triangulates the relevant points around the control points into a TIN. For classified data sets containing a mix of ground and vegetation/building points

reads LAS or LAZ files containing points from multi-return LiDAR systems and either reports return statistics, find and marks sets of points from the same laser shots that are incomplete (i.e. missing returns), or repairs the ‘number of returns’ field based on GPS times. Note that input files need to be sorted based on their GPS

is a tool that reads LIDAR points from LAS/LAZ or ASCII files and computes the flight line overlap and / or the vertical and horizontal alignment. The output rasters can either be a color coded visual illustration of the level of overlap or the differences or the actual values and can be either in BIL,

This is a handy tool to report the contents of the header, the VLRs, and a short summary of the min and max values of the points for LAS/LAZ files. The tool warns when there is a difference between the header information and the point content for counters and bounding box extent. When you send us a support

Creates a LiDAR portal for 3D visualization (and optionally also for downloading) of LAS and LAZ files in any modern Web browser using the WebGL Potree from Markus Schuetz. See README file for more information.

reads LIDAR data in the LAS format and computes statistics that tell us whether the precision “advertised” in the header is really in the data. Often I find that the scaling factors of a LAS/LAZ file is miss-leading because they make it appear as if there was much more precision than there really is. To

This tool classifies, flags, or removes LiDAR points based on their approximate xy distance from polygonal segments. This distance is calculated on a grid with a spacing of 0.5 meters by default. With ‘-step_xy 1.0’ the granularity of this grid can be adjusted up or down. Please license from info@rapidlasso.de before using lasdistance commercially. Please

compares the LIDAR data of two LAS/LAZ/ASCII files and reports whether they are identical or whether they are different. See README file for more information.

Transforms LiDAR from one horizontal datum to another using either a NTv2 grid or a seven parameter helmert transform. Note that there are two ways of specifying the rotational part of the Helmert transform. The Position Vector Transformation (PVR) convention and the Coordinate Frame Rotation (CFR) convention.The difference between them is that their rotation matrix

This tool copies selected attributes from LiDAR points from a source to a target LAS/LAZ file using the GPS-time stamp and the return number as a reference. By default the selected attributes of the source points are copied to all target points if the two share the exact samecombination of GPS-time stamp and return number.

This tool flags or removes noise points in LAS/LAZ/BIN/ASCII files. The tool looks for isolated points according to certain criteria that can be modified via ‘-step 3’ and ‘-isolated 3’ as needed. The default for step is 4 and for isolated is 5. It is possible to specify the xy and the z size of

is a tool that splits LAS or LAZ files into multiple files based on some criteria. By default it splits the points into separate files based on the ‘point source ID’ field that usually contains the flightline ID. Others options are The last of these simply splits the input into chunks of 1000000 points. One

tiles a potentially very large amount of LAS/LAZ/ASCII points from one  or many files into square non-overlapping tiles of a specified size and save them into LAS or LAZ format. Optionally the tool can also create a small ‘-buffer 10’ around every tile where the parameter 10 specifies the number of units each tile is

finds and removes all duplicate points from a LAS/LAZ/ASCII file. In the default mode those are xy-duplicate points that have identical x and y coordinates. The first point survives, all subsequent duplicates are removed. It is also possible to keep the lowest points amongst all xy-duplicates via ‘-lowest_z’. It is also possible to remove only

sorts the points of a LAS/LAZ/ASCII file into z-order arranged cells of a square quad tree and saves them into LAS or LAZ format. This is useful to bucket together returns from different swaths or to merge first and last returns that were stored in separate files. Alternatively lassort can sort a LAS/LAZ file in

This is a free tool to optimizes LiDAR stored in binary LAS or LAZ format (1.0 – 1.4) for better compression and spatial coherency. Especially useful prior to distributing LiDAR via data portals to lower bandwidth and storage but also to accelerate subsequent exploitation. In the default setting the tool will do the following: Options

takes as input a LAS/LAZ/TXT file and a SHP/TXT file with one or many polygons (e.g. building footprints or flight lines), clips away all the points that fall outside all polygons (or inside some polygon), and stores the surviving points to the output LAS/LAZ/TXT file. Instead of clipping the points they can also be classified.

reads LIDAR from LAS/LAZ/ASCII files and computes a boundary polygon that encloses the points. By default this is a joint concave hull where “islands of points” are connected by edges that are traversed in each direction once. Optionally a disjoint concave hull is computed with the ‘-disjoint’ flag. This can lead to multiple hulls in case of islands. Note

reads LiDAR points of an airborne collect and finds the “overage” points that get covered by more than a single flightline. It either marks these overage points or removes them from the output files. The tool requires that the files either have the flightline information stored for each point in the point source ID field

This is a handy tool to merge multiple LiDAR files into one. However, we usually discourage this practice as this can also be achieved on-the-fly with the ‘-merged’ option in any of the other LAStools without creating a second copy on disk. In addition this tools allows splitting larger files into smaller subsets each containing a user-specified number of

Spatial indexing of LiDAR data. 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

Add layer functionality to LAS/LAZ files. See README file for more information.

is almost identical to las2iso except that it can extract elevation contours from much much larger inputs. While las2iso operates in-core and is therefore limited to a maximum of around 20 million points, blast2iso utilizes unique “streaming TIN” technology and can seamlessly process up to 2 billion points. This tool is part of the BLAST extension of LAStools. For more details see the README file.

is almost identical to las2dem except that it can process much much larger inputs. While las2dem operates in-core and is therefore limited to a maximum of around 20 million points, blast2dem utilizes unique “streaming TIN” technology and can seamlessly process up to 2 billion points. This tool is part of the BLAST extension of LAStools. For more details see the README file.

reads LIDAR data in LAS/LAZ/ASCII format and creates a TIN. It is possible to triangulate only certain points like only first returns (-first_only) or only last returns (-last_only). One can also only triangulate only points that have a particularclassification. The option (-keep_class 2 3) will triangulate only the points of classification 2 or 3. The

Compares rasters in ASC, BIL, TIF, IMG and RasterLAZ format andreports differences. See README file for more information.

This tools computes a voxelization of points and stores the number of voxels per cell as the intensity. You can specify the xy and the z size of the voxel cells separately with ‘-step_xy 2’ and ‘-step_z 0.3’ which would create cells of size 2 by 2 by 0.3 units or use uniform sized cells

is a tool that computes common forestry metrics from height-normalized LiDAR point clouds. It can compute canopy density or canopy cover (or gap fractions), height or intensity percentiles, averages, minima, maxima, kurtosis, skewness, standard deviation, and many more. The input plots can either be defined in several ways: Gridded plots can either be output as a

computes the height of each point above the ground. This assumes that grounds points have already been ground-classified (with standard classification 2 or selected with ‘-class 31’ or ‘-classification 8’) so they can be identified to construct a ground TIN. The ground points can also be in an separate file ‘-ground_points ground.las’ or ‘-ground_points dtm.csv

is a tool that reads LIDAR from LAS/LAZ/ASCII and grids them onto a raster. The most important parameter ‘-step n’ specifies the n x n area that of LiDAR points that are gridded on one raster cell (or pixel). The output is either in BIL, ASC, IMG, TIF, PNG, JPG, XYZ, FLT, or DTM format.

is a tool that reads LIDAR points from LAS/LAZ/ASCII (or rasters from ASC/BIL/DTM format) and extracts a set of particular elevation contours in SHP/KML/WKT/TXT format. The user may specify to extract contours every 5 meters or only for individual elevation values. The contours can be smoothed or simplified on demand and hydro breaklines can be specified as well. las2iso can

is a tool that triangulates LIDAR points from the LAS/LAZ format (or some ASCII format) into a temporary TIN and then rasters the TIN to create a DEM. The tool can either raster the ‘-elevation’, the ‘-slope’, the ‘-intensity’, the ‘-rgb’ values, or a ‘-hillshade’ or ‘-gray’ or ‘-false’ coloring. The output is either in

Compresses and uncompresses raster data from ASC, BIL, TIF, IMG format to the compressed RasterLAZ format. The expected inputs are rasters containing elevation data such as DTM, DSM, or CHM rasters, or GEOID difference grids, or forestry metrics. These values will be compressed into the z coordinate of RasterLAZ. See README file for more information.

LASzip is our free open source product to quickly turn bulky LAS files into compact LAZ files without information loss. Terabytes of LAZ data are now available for free download from various agencies making LASzip, winner of the 2012 Geospatial World Forum Technology Innovation Award in LiDAR Processing and runner-up for innovative product at INTERGEO 2012, the de-facto

A simple LiDAR thinning algorithm for LAS/LAZ/ASCII. It places a uniform grid over the points and within each grid cell keeps only the point with the lowest (or ‘-highest’) Z coordinate a -random’ point per cell or the most ‘-central’ one. When keeping ‘-random’ points you can in addition specify a ‘-seed 232’ for the

computes the height above or the distance in x/y from each point and its trajectory. The tool takes as input one (or many) LAS or LAZ files together with a trajectory file in the same projection that must have matching GPS time stamps. Switches like ‘-classify_below -0.4 7’  classify all points that are 40 centimeter or lower than

is a tool to classify buildings and high vegetation (i.e. trees) in LAS/LAZ files. This tool requires that the bare-earth points have already been identified (e.g. with lasground) and that the elevation of each point above the ground was already computed with lasheight (which stores a coarse height value in the ‘user_data’ field of each

This is a tool for bare-earth extraction: it classifies LIDAR points into ground points (class = 2) and non-ground points(class = 1). This is a totally redesigned version of lasground that handles complicated terrain much better where there are steep mountains nearby urban areas with many buildings. You can use other classifications than the ASRPS

is a tool for bare-earth extraction: it classifies the LiDAR points into ground points (class = 2) and non-ground points (class = 1). The tools works very well in natural environments such as mountains, forests, fields, hills, and even steep terrain but also gives excellent results in towns or cities. For more details see the README file.

converts LIDAR from LAS/LAZ/ASCII to ESRI’s Shapefile format by grouping consecutive points into MultiPointZ records. The default size is 1024. It can be changed with ‘-record 2048’. If you want to use PointZ records instead you need to add ‘-single_points’ to the command line. See README file for more information.

Extracts the points from the E57 format and stores them as LAS/LAZ files. This tool reads LiDAR in the E57 format from a *.e57 file and converts it to either standard LAS, compressed LAZ, or simple ASCII TXT. By default all scans contained in the E57 file are merged into one output with all invalid

This tool is the “swiss-army knife” of LiDAR file processing. It can convert, filter, transform, subset, repair, scale, translate, zero, clamp, compress, initialize, … LAS or LAZ files in numerous ways. This tool is 100% open source LGPL. For more details see the README file.

This handy tool converts from points from bloated ASCII to binary LAS or compressed LAZ file. When you send us a support request for this tool please include a few lines (around 20 to 50) of your ASCII text representation as well the command lines (aka parse strings) that you have already tried: txt2las -i

A simple open source tool licensed LGPL 2.1 that converts binary LAS or LAZ files to human readable ASCII text format. Below is an example command line that converts one LAZ file to text by placing the x, y, and z coordinate of each point as the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd entries, the intensity as

Finds sufficiently planar patches of LAS/LAZ points fulfilling a number of user-defineable criteria that are output as simple polygons to SHP or RIEGL’s PEF format. The tool was originally designed for generating tie planes to match the point clouds of a mobile scan that suffer from errors in the GPS trajectory to accurate terrestrial scans

reads LIDAR data in LAS/LAZ/ASCII format and creates a TIN. It is possible to triangulate only certain points like only first returns (-first_only) or only last returns (-last_only). One can also only triangulate only points that have a particularclassification. The option (-keep_class 2 3) will triangulate only the points of classification 2 or 3. The

This tool probes the elevation of the LIDAR for a given x and y location and reports it to a text file or to stdout. The tool reads LIDAR in LAS/LAZ/ASCII format, triangulates the relevant points into a TIN. For classified data sets containing a mix of ground and vegetation/building points it is imperative to

Transforms LiDAR from ellipsoidal to orthometric elevations using a grid in format that is usually provided by the national survey and expresses the vertical differences between some geoidal model and some elliptical model of the earth. By default the conversion is from ellipsoidal elevations to geoidal (or orthometric) elevations. If you want to go theother

Converts from points from ESRI’s Shapefile to LAS/LAZ/ASCIIformat given the input contains Points or MultiPoints (thatis any of the shape types 1,11,21,8,18,28). See README file for details.