[Liblas-devel] lasinfo and las2las replacements

[Howard Butler]

All,

As part of the buildup to the next release (crossing my fingers for a source release tonight if I can get the last bits done), I have completely reimplemented lasinfo and las2las.  I have preserved the old versions in the form of lasinfo-old and las2las-old in case people had processes that were using these utilities.  The new versions are at least twice as fast as previous libLAS variants of Martin's tools, and 30x more expressive, especially in the form of filtering and transforming data.  The filters that are available to las2las are also available to lasinfo, and use can use these advanced filters to summarize data.  

Here's a short summary of some of the updates for lasinfo:

- lasinfo now supports optionally outputting an XML representation of the summary to stdout
- lasinfo outputs more information about the point format layout in the form of "schema" information
- lasinfo supports numerous attribute filters

<http://liblas.org/utilities/lasinfo.html> contains a help dump, and I expect to update this with more detailed help in the near future.

<http://liblas.org/utilities/las2las.html> contains a help file for the new las2las, which should give you a feel for what's available.  You should find things much more expressive and powerful  Options including splitting files by # of megabytes or points, expressive filters, and numerous header value assignments and transformations

The downside is that the argument names have been changed a bit, and you may have to learn some new syntax.  The speed improvement, especially for las2las, should give you incentive to change, however :)

Howard


> fire:data hobu$ time las2las-old TO_core_last_zoom.las foo.las
> Creating another reader...
>   Reparing Point Count by Return...
> 
> real	0m8.473s
> user	0m8.329s
> sys	0m0.117s
> fire:data hobu$ time las2las TO_core_last_zoom.las output.las
> 
> real	0m3.244s
> user	0m3.139s
> sys	0m0.085s