[Liblas-devel] Open source lidar software?

[Peter Bunting [pfb]]

I've been developing some tools which I published last year, although the websites (http://www.spdlib.org/,  http://spdpointsviewer.sourceforge.net) and documentation (what little I previously wrote) are currently out of date, as I've undertaken a significant rewrite of the software to support the storage and processing of full waveform data over the past few months. I am just preparing to release this version as the released version of the project along with some initial documentation.

The primary output is the Sorted Pulse Data (SPD) library (http://www.spdlib.org/) which provides tools for converting LiDAR data from various formats to the SPD format we've defined, within a HDF5 file, and tools for processing the data in this format. The 'sorted' part of the name refers to a grid based index within the file, allowing 'image like' random geographic access to the data. Additionally, in the new version (svn trunk not the released version) the laser scanning data is stored and manipulated as pulses (either with discrete returns, waveform or both) rather than as individual returns - I've found this has a number of advantages but has increased files sizes.

Additionally, I have also developed a viewer (http://spdpointsviewer.sourceforge.net) which takes advantages of the index and pulse based data structures and is written on top of the spdlib software using QT for the GUI so it should be fully cross platform (I've only run it on Mac and Linux to date). Again, the website hasn't been updated yet with details of the latest version and the release (mac binary) is based on the pre-pulse based spdlib but the screenshots and videos are still valid. Although, a more recent video demoing the visualisation of the full waveform data is available here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebb8uSHF5wg.

Both of these projects are under active development, supporting our research, but the recently rewritten library still requires a fair bit more testing before I would call it 'stable'.

Pete

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Dr. Peter Bunting; Lecturer; Earth Observation
pfb at aber.ac.uk 
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Institute of Geography and Earth Science, Llandinam Building, 
Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23 3DB, UK
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On 7 Apr 2011, at 05:37, Michael P. Gerlek wrote:

> Yes, grass is on my list but got omitted from the mail.
> 
> I'll call your bluff / nag you on the viewer, though -- can you give us any
> details?
> 
> -mpg
> 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Mike Grant [mailto:mggr at pml.ac.uk]
>> Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2011 10:31 AM
>> To: mpg at flaxen.com
>> Cc: liblas-devel at lists.osgeo.org
>> Subject: Re: [Liblas-devel] Open source lidar software?
>> 
>> On 06/04/11 18:19, Michael P. Gerlek wrote:
>>> I'm doing an informal survey of the landscape for open source lidar
>>> software (visualization, format conversion, dem generation,
>>> filtering/classification, etc), and it turns out the world is a lot more
> bleak
>> than I'd expected:
>> 
>> We use GRASS for a lot of this (perhaps you've covered it with qgis?).
>> 
>>> Does anyone have any others to add to the list?  I'm only interested
>>> in tools for which source is available under a legit OSI license and
>>> which seem to be relatively stable and/or actively maintained -- so
>>> this excludes Fusion, ALPS, Opals, ALDPAT, lastools, fullanalyze, ...
>> 
>> We wrote a LAS viewer (GPL) for bigger-than-RAM LIDAR data but we've not
>> published it yet so it also doesn't count :/  I keep meaning to do this
> (please
>> nag!).
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> Mike.
>> 
>> 
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