[gdal-dev] LAS support

[Mateusz Loskot]

On 29 November 2013 18:39, Even Rouault <even.rouault at mines-paris.org> wrote:
> Le vendredi 29 novembre 2013 18:35:28, Rui L. Pires a écrit :
>> On 29 November 2013 11:44, Mateusz Loskot <mateusz at loskot.net> wrote:
>> > On 29 November 2013 10:32, Rui L. Pires <rlpires at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > > I was approaching this issue and particularly OGR as a solution for
>> > > data conversion and reduction. I am quite fond of the functionality
>> > > OGRLayer makes possible in a transparent way, such as reprojection and
>> > > spatial querying.
>> >
>> > Those are valid use cases of course and I don't argue here.
>> > Just, since OGR is an abstraction layer and point clouds are enormous,
>> > I wouldn't expect high performance.
>> > That's why, IMHO, point clouds require dedicated toolkits (PDAL, PCL).
>>
>> Hi Mateusz,
>>
>> I understand your point regarding performance but I consider that to be a
>> driver issue. My point is functionality before speed.
>>
>> Perhaps, you can try las2ogr to see how OGR in general will work for your
>>
>> > uses.
>> > Besides, writing OGR driver with libLAS (or PDAL) should be feasible.
>>
>> Indeed it is feasible. It's running fine here! ;-)
>
> I'm not versed in lidar or point clouds to know if it is really relevant, but
> it is true that OGR has drivers for stuff that aren't strictly vector formats.
> And as las2ogr exists, I also imagine that an OGR driver should be doable.
> So it would not be completely out of topic to have a OGR driver based on
> libLAS or PDAL

Sure. As I've said, I somewhat changed my opinion on that lately :-)

> (the question is : should it be based on libLAS or PDAL ? Any
> opinion on this ?)

AFAICT, it should be PDAL as libLAS is considered as deprecated
and not actively maintained. But, I'll leave this to Hobu to confirm.

> A potential problem is that libLAS and PDAL have GDAL as a build dependency,
> so a OGR driver would need to be compiled as a plugin (same as GRASS plugin
> for example).

That's right.

Best regards,
-- 
Mateusz  Łoskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net