[pdal] lazperf Python support

[Howard Butler]

All,

Hopefully this topic is interesting to you. In an effort to make it more convenient to use LAZ-style compression with other formats, we have developed a library that provides an alternate implementation of LAZ called lazperf. We have been using this for compression with PDAL database drivers [1] and over-the-wire compression of HTTP requests with Greyhound [2]. 

lazperf is also available in JavaScript and C++, and the addition of a Python implementation rounds out the ecosystem to make it convenient for people to use it. Think of this style of compression as LAZ minus the LAS model. It isn't as efficient as LAZ, but it does about the same as LZMA in space in addition to being significantly faster [3]. 

I hope to add actual LAZ support via this mechanism to the Python bindings to allow libraries such as laspy [4] to take advantage. There's a bit more work to do on that topic, however. See the test suite [4] for examples how to use it, and happy compressing!

Howard

[1] http://www.pdal.io/stages/writers.oci.html
[2] https://github.com/hobu/greyhound
[3] https://github.com/pgpointcloud/pointcloud/pull/105#issuecomment-225012856
[4] https://github.com/hobu/laz-perf/blob/master/python/test/test_lazperf.py