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We are pleased to announce the integration of the universal vector library GDAL into LAStools. In addition to the native SHP (shapefile) reader/writer that LAStools has long offered, the GDAL implementation now also allows LAStools users to read and write vector formats in KML, GeoJSON, GML (Geography Markup Language), GPKG (GeoPackage), and GPX (GPS Exchange Format). The

The lascopy tool is well-known for matching data from different LAS/LAZ files and copying attributes between the files. The matching key is expected to have an identical timestamp/return to match the data. The redesign of lascopy expands the matching and coping part of the tool: it can now match not only for identical GPS time

Our popular E57 to LAS/LAZ converter e572las is now also available for Linux. The converter converts point clouds from the E57 format to the LAS or the lossless compressed LAZ format. Download the binaries. The tar.gz package contains 3 files. Filename Description e572las_README.md The README file with the documentation of the tool. e572las64 The tool

With the latest release of LAStools (230731) we are introducing two new tools:

LAS and LAZ are both very common and powerful formats to save pointcloud data. Nevertheless, some users, or programs, may require another point data format. A common general format to save geometric data, for said requirement, is the wavefront OBJ format. Using one of the sample LAZ files of LAStools we will show you how

Until now LAStools have 2 tools to modify lidar data using shapefiles: las3dpoly covers the missing z dimension. This enables the user to modify points along a 3D-corridor within a LiDAR data file. One possible use for this feature is classifying powerlines. Below you will find an example of how to classify powerlines: The sample

In memory of Martin Isenburg, Creator of LAZ, LAStools & BLAST and Founder of rapidlasso, we share his full story “The Lidar Legacy of Martin Isenburg”, recently published as cover story of Lidar Magazine: https://lidarmag.com/2023/02/14/tools-for-a-better-tomorrow/

The rapidlasso tutorials are intended to provide an easy introduction to LAStools. To read the tutorials offline please download the tutorials PDF. This huge PDF file (~250 MB) gives you an overview of different aspects of LAStools and how to use the tools. Videos There are a lot of videos about LAStools. This is a

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“

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

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“

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):

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

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)

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

[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

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

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

[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

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

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

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)

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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