[pdal] Migrating from libLAS

[Andrew Bell]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 7:15 AM, Newcomb, Doug <doug_newcomb at fws.gov> wrote:
> Does this mean that with the new version of r.in.lidar using pdal that the
> file size that can be read in will be limited by the amount of memory on my
> computer?

Virtual memory.

>  I currently use r.in.lidar with liblas and can process aggregated las files
> with up to 4.2 billion points with memory usage limited by the amount of map
> in memory parameter. ( The type of the analysis cell size and extent also
> affect memory usage)

Not sure what you're referring to with "map in memory," but on most
systems you can add more virtual memory quite easily.

> Would continuing to keep all the points for a file in memory lead to smaller
> and smaller physical tile sizes as point densities increase?

I'm not sure I understand this.  PDAL lets you create point subsets.
Those subsets may look like tiles when displayed.  The point subsets
have very little impact on memory consumption.

> I was hoping that the move to pdal would allow a move to las 1.4 format with
> more points per file than 4.2 billion to reduce having to deal with tile
> edge effects.

Not sure what the tile edge effects are.  You should be able to
rebuild PDAL to handle more than 2^32 points, but we haven't tried it.

-- 
Andrew Bell
andrew.bell.ia at gmail.com