[pdal] PDAL Tutorials

[Bradley Chambers]

Since the release of PDAL v1.0.0 [1], we've been making strides in bringing
our documentation up-to-date (we've still got a ways to go!). Of course,
we've also been busy adding some new bells and whistles, and making other
improvements for those who may be building off of master [2].

For those who may be interested, I wanted to take a minute to highlight
just a few of these updates and enhancements.

The first one is not even a tutorial. Did you know that PDAL command-line
application can now construct pipelines on-the-fly with the translate
command? You can specify the input and output filename, along with a list
of any of PDAL's supported filters to be applied sequentially. Once you are
happy with your pipeline, you can output the pipeline XML for later reuse.
Find complete details at [3].

A common question is whether or not PDAL can compute normalized heights. In
[4], hobu provided a means of computing these height above ground values
given an input raster and some python scripting. Since then, I've added an
additional tutorial for performing the calculation directly on a point
cloud with point classifications. You can find it here [5].

Finally, I was recently looking for a means of subsampling my input point
cloud to accelerate another, downstream filtering process. PDAL has
provided a decimation and voxel grid filter for quite some time, but each
of these has drawbacks. I decided to implement a Poisson sampling technique
called dart throwing instead. This filter has now been added to master, and
a write up with a short comparison of the decimation approaches is provided
at [6].

I hope you enjoy. And feel free to let us know if you have any questions!

Brad

[1] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/pdal/2015-September/000704.html
[2] https://github.com/PDAL/PDAL/tree/master
[3] http://www.pdal.io/apps.html#translate-command
[4] https://github.com/PDAL/PDAL/pull/1002
[5] http://www.pdal.io/tutorial/calculating-normalized-heights.html
[6] http://www.pdal.io/tutorial/dart-throwing.html
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