NRW Open LiDAR: Download, Compression, Viewing

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 this tutorial after downloading the latest version of LAStools as well as a pair of DGM and DOM files for your area of interest from these two download pages.

We have downloaded the pair of DGM and DOM files for the Federal City of Bonn. Bonn is the former capital of Germany and was host to the FOSS4G 2016 conference. As both files are larger than 10 GB, we use the wget command line tool with option ‚-c‘ that will restart where it left off in case the transmission gets interrupted.

The DGM file and the DOM file are zipped archives that contain the points in 1km by 1km tiles stored as x, y, z coordinates in ETRS89 / UTM 32 projection as simple ASCII text with centimeter resolution (i.e. two decimal digits).

>> more dgm1l-lpb_32360_5613_1_nw.xyz
360000.00 5613026.69 164.35
360000.00 5613057.67 164.20
360000.00 5613097.19 164.22
360000.00 5613117.89 164.08
360000.00 5613145.35 164.03
[...]

There is more than one tile for each square kilometer as the LiDAR points have been split into different files based on their classification and their return type. Furthermore there are also synthetic points that were used by the land survey department to replace certain LiDAR points in order to generate higher quality DTM and DSM raster products.

The zipped DGM archive is 10.5 GB in size and contains 956 *.xyz files totaling 43.5 GB after decompression. The zipped DOM archive is 11.5 GB in size and contains 244 *.xyz files totaling 47.8 GB. Repeatedly loading these 90 GB of text data and parsing these human-readable x, y, and z coordinates is inefficient with common LiDAR software. In the first step we convert the textual *.xyz files into binary *.laz files that can be stored, read and copied more efficiently. We do this with the open source LASzip compressor that is distributed with LAStools using these two command line calls:

laszip -i dgm1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\*.xyz ^
       -epsg 25832 -vertical_dhhn92 ^
       -olaz ^
       -cores 2
laszip -i dom1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\*.xyz ^
       -epsg 25832 -vertical_dhhn92 ^
       -olaz ^
       -cores 2

The point coordinates are is in EPSG 5555, which is a compound datum of horizontal EPSG 25832 aka ETRS89 / UTM zone 32N and vertical EPSG 5783 aka the „Deutsches Haupthoehennetz 1992“ or DHHN92. We add this information to each *.laz file during the LASzip compression process with the command line options ‚-epsg 25832‘ and ‚-vertical_dhhn92‘.

LASzip reduces the file size by a factor of 10. The 956 *.laz DGM files compress down to 4.3 GB from 43.5 GB for the original *.xyz files and the 244 *.laz DOM files compress down to 4.8 GB from 47.8 GB. From here on out we continue to work with the 9 GB of slim *.laz files. But before we delete the 90 GB of bulky *.xyz files we make sure that there are no file corruptions (e.g. disk full, truncated files, interrupted processes, bit flips, …) in the *.laz files.

laszip -i dgm1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\*.laz -check
laszip -i dom1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\*.laz -check

One advantage of having the LiDAR in an industry standard such as the LAS format (or its lossless compressed twin, the LAZ format) is that the header of the file stores the number of points per file, the bounding box, as well as the projection information that we have added. This allows us to very quickly load an overview for example, into lasview.

lasview -i dgm1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\*.laz -GUI
The bounding boxes of the DGM files quickly display a preview of the data in the GUI when the files are in LAS or LAZ format.
The bounding boxes of the DGM files quickly give us an overview in the GUI when the files are in LAS or LAZ format.

Now we want to find a particular site in Bonn such as the World Conference Center Bonn where FOSS4G 2016 was held. Which tile is it in? We need some geospatial context to find it, for example, by creating an overview in form of KML files that we can load into Google Earth. We use the files from the DOM folder with “fp” in the name as points on buildings are mostly „first returns“. See what our previous blog post writes about the different file names or look at the second part of this series. We can create the KML files with lasboundary either via the GUI or in the command line.

lasboundary -i dom1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\dom1l-fp*.laz ^
            -gui
Only the "fp" tiles from the DOM folder loaded the GUI into lasboundary.
Only the „fp“ tiles from the DOM folder loaded the GUI into lasboundary.
lasboundary -i dom1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\dom1l-fp*.laz ^
            -use_bb -labels -okml

We zoom in and find the World Conference Center Bonn and load the identified tile into lasview. Well, we did not expect this to happen, but what we see below will make this series of tutorials even more worthwhile. There is a lot of „high noise“ in the particular tile we picked. We should have noticed the unusually high z range of 406.42 meters in the Google Earth pop-up. Is this high electromagnetic radiation interfering with the sensors? There are a number of high-tech government buildings with all kind of antennas nearby (such as the United Nations Bonn Campus the mouse cursor points at).

Significant amounts of high noise are in the first returns of the DOM tile we picked.
Significant amounts of high noise are in the first returns of the DOM tile we picked.

But the intended area of interest was found. You can see the iconic „triangulated“ roof of the building that is across from the World Conference Center Bonn.

The World Conference Center Bonn is across from the building with the "triangulated" roof.
The World Conference Center Bonn is across from the building with the „triangulated“ roof.

Please don’t think it is the responsibility of OpenNRW to remove the noise and provide cleaner data. The land survey has already processed this data into whatever products they needed and that is where their job ended. Any additional services – other than sharing the raw data – are not in their job description. We’ll take care of that … (-:

Acknowledgement: The LiDAR data of OpenNRW comes with a very permissible license. It is called „Datenlizenz Deutschland – Namensnennung – Version 2.0“ or „dl-de/by-2-0“ and allows data and derivative sharing as well as commercial use. It only requires us to name the source. We need to cite the „Land NRW (2017)“ with the year of the download in brackets and specify the Universal Resource Identification (URI) for both the DOM and the DGM. Done. So easy. Thank you, OpenNRW … (-:

0 Kommentare zu „NRW Open LiDAR: Download, Compression, Viewing“

  1. Pingback: First Open LiDAR in Germany | rapidlasso GmbH

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