Here is a video of my talk at ELMF 2011 on „LASzip: lossless compression of LiDAR data“.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0s0fVktj6U]
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 1 to 4 millions points per second and compressed files are only 7 to 25 percent of the original size.Compression and decompression happen on-the-fly in a streaming manner and random-access is supported. A reference implementation unencumbered by patents or intellectual property concerns is freely available with an LGPL-license here.