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ArcGIS LAStools toolbox for LiDAR processing 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 images at the end). ALso check

An open source effort for a vendor-neutral exchange format for geo-referenced full waveform LiDAR called PulseWaves. The format is similar to the ASPRS LAS standard, but instead of storing discrete returns, it stores geo-referenced laser pulses and those parts of the outgoing and returning waveforms that were digitized. The source code and the specification of the PulseWaves format

This is an overview about all rapidlasso products.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 –

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

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

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“

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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