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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 […]

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

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“

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)

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

[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

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

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

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.