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 …
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. Below an …
