Scotland’s LiDAR goes Open Data (too)

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 raster derivatives down to 25 cm resolution and in March 2016 also the raw point clouds went online our compressed and open LAZ format (more info here) – all with the very permissible Open Government Licence v3. This treasure cove of geospatial data was collected by the Environment Agency Geomatics own survey aircraft mainly for flood mapping purposes. The data that had been access restricted for the past 17 years of operation and was made open only after it was shown that restricting access in order to recover costs to finance future operations – a common argument for withholding tax-payer funded data – was nothing but an utter myth. This open data policy has resulted in an incredible re-use of the LiDAR and the Environment Agency has literally been propelled into the role of a “champion for open data” inspiring Wales (possibly the German states of North-Rhine Westfalia and Thuringia) and now also Scotland to open up their geospatial archives as well …

Huge LAS files available for download from the Scottish Open Data portal.

We went to the nice online portal of Scotland to download three files from the Phase II LiDAR for Scotland that are provided as uncompressed LAS files, namely LAS_NN45NE.las, LAS_NN55NE.las, and LAS_NN55NW.las, whose sizes are listed as 1.2 GB, 2.8 GB, and 4.7 GB in the screenshot above. Needless to say that it took quite some time and several restarts (using wget with option ‚-c‘) to successfully download these very large LAS files.

laszip -i LAS_NN45NE.las -odix _cm -olaz -rescale 0.01 0.01 0.01 
laszip -i LAS_NN45NE.las -odix _mm -olaz
laszip -i LAS_NN55NE.las -odix _cm -olaz -rescale 0.01 0.01 0.01 
laszip -i LAS_NN55NE.las -odix _mm -olaz
laszip -i LAS_NN55NW.las -odix _cm -olaz -rescale 0.01 0.01 0.01 
laszip -i LAS_NN55NW.las -odix _mm -olaz

After downloading we decided to see how well these files compress with LASzip by running the six commands shown above creating LAZ files when re-scaling of coordinate resolution to centimeter (cm) and LAZ files with the original millimeter (mm) coordinate resolution (i.e. the original scale factors are 0.001 which is somewhat excessive for aerial LiDAR where the error in position per coordinate is typically between 5 cm and 20 cm). Below you see the resulting file sizes for the three different files.

 1,164,141,247 LAS_NN45NE.las
   124,351,690 LAS_NN45NE_cm.laz (1 : 9.4)
   146,651,719 LAS_NN45NE_mm.laz (1 : 7.9)
 2,833,123,863 LAS_NN55NE.las
   396,521,115 LAS_NN55NE_cm.laz (1 : 7.1)
   474,767,495 LAS_NN55NE_mm.laz (1 : 6.0)
 4,664,782,671 LAS_NN55NW.las
   531,454,473 LAS_NN55NW_cm.laz (1 : 8.8)
   629,141,151 LAS_NN55NW_mm.laz (1 : 7.4)

The savings in download time and storage space of storing the LiDAR in LAZ versus LAS are sixfold to tenfold. If I was a tax payer in Scotland and if my government was hosting open data on in the Amazon cloud (i.e. paying for AWS cloud services with my taxes) I would encourage them to store their data in a more compressed format. Some more details on the data.

According to the provided meta data, the Scottish Public Sector LiDAR Phase II dataset was commissioned by the Scottish Government in response to the Flood Risk Management Act (2009). The project was managed by Sniffer and the contract was awarded to Fugro BKS. Airborne LiDAR data was collected for 66 sites (the dataset does not have full national coverage) totaling 3,516 km^2 between 29th November 2012 and 18th April 2014. The point density was a minimum of 1 point/sqm, and approximately 2 points/sqm on average. A DTM and DSM were produced from the point clouds, with 1m spatial resolution. The Coordinate reference system is OSGB 1936 / British National Grid (EPSG code 27700). The data is licensed under an Open Government Licence. However, under the use constraints section it now only states that the following attribution statement must be used to acknowledge the source of the information: „Copyright Scottish Government and SEPA (2014)“ but also that Fugro retain the commercial copyright, which is somewhat disconcerting and may require more clarification. According to this tweet a lesser license (NCGL) applies to the raw LiDAR point clouds. Below a lasinfo report for the large LAS_NN55NW.las as well as several visualizations with lasview.

lasinfo (170915) report for LAS_NN55NW.las
reporting all LAS header entries:
 file signature: 'LASF'
 file source ID: 0
 global_encoding: 1
 project ID GUID data 1-4: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000
 version major.minor: 1.2
 system identifier: 'Riegl LMS-Q'
 generating software: 'Fugro LAS Processor'
 file creation day/year: 343/2016
 header size: 227
 offset to point data: 227
 number var. length records: 0
 point data format: 1
 point data record length: 28
 number of point records: 166599373
 number of points by return: 149685204 14102522 2531075 280572 0
 scale factor x y z: 0.001 0.001 0.001
 offset x y z: 250050 755050 270
 min x y z: 250000.000 755000.000 203.731
 max x y z: 254999.999 759999.999 491.901
reporting minimum and maximum for all LAS point record entries ...
 X -50000 4949999
 Y -50000 4949999
 Z -66269 221901
 intensity 39 2046
 return_number 1 4
 number_of_returns 1 4
 edge_of_flight_line 0 1
 scan_direction_flag 1 1
 classification 1 11
 scan_angle_rank -30 30
 user_data 0 3
 point_source_ID 66 91
 gps_time 38230669.389034 38402435.753789
number of first returns: 149685204
number of intermediate returns: 2813604
number of last returns: 149687616
number of single returns: 135599244
overview over number of returns of given pulse: 135599244 23122229 6754118 1123782 0 0 0
histogram of classification of points:
 287819 unclassified (1)
 109019874 ground (2)
 14476880 low vegetation (3)
 3487218 medium vegetation (4)
 39141518 high vegetation (5)
 165340 building (6)
 13508 rail (10)
 7216 road surface (11)

Kudos to the Scottish government for opening their data. We hereby acknowledge the source of the LiDAR that we have used in the experiments above as „Copyright Scottish Government and SEPA (2014)“.

0 Kommentare zu „Scotland’s LiDAR goes Open Data (too)“

  1. Why is the Scottish LIDAR detail so poor compared to England,England has far more coverage and far more detail they also have side by side maps and LIDAR?

    No doubt the SG have spent thousands if not millions of pounds on this for a very poor product surely your not happy about this?

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