PulseWaves is a new exchange format for full waveform LiDAR data. Below you see a simple visualization of a small sample of full waveform LiDAR data exported from RIEGL’s RiProcess to the PulseWaves format via a prototype of the PulseWaves DLL interface.
Illustrated in 3D are the waveforms of 50 pulses via a green to red shading of their intensity. Plotted in more detail in 2D from left to right are the waveforms of a single pulse that is in the very center of these 50 pulses. The outgoing waveform is red. The returning waveform – in this case consisting of two segments – is blue.
The 3D points (here mostly yellow apart from a few orange and blue ones) correspond to the first recorded waveform sample of each pulse. Through them a particular pulse (or a set of pulses) can be picked by pressing the ‚i‘ hot key in the interactive 3D viewer – pulseview.exe – when hovering over a point. The color coding of these points indicates that different pulse descriptors are used for describing the waveforms of the corresponding pulse. For more details go to the discussion forum at http://pulsewaves.org/ where you find links to the specification, the tools, and some sample data.