[pgpointcloud] Howto read/convert PTS or PTX formats?

[Martin Isenburg]

Hello.

you can use the pointzip.exe tool, but that is mainly meant to "take
the edge off" as it has been my experience that the terrestrial
scanner folks are very GUI centric and these folks seem reluctant to
enter the command-line world.

instead of using pointzip.exe through the GUI you can also use

laszip -i in.pts -ipts -o out.laz

or

laszip -i in.ptx -iptx -o out.laz

and the extra PTS or PTX information will be stored in an additional
VLR record so it could be recovered if needed (for the PTX it is
likely needed if there are any values in the translation or rotation
matrices)

Is pointzip.exe being used much in the terrestrial world? I got a lot
of feedback after release but it has died down since.

Martin

PS: The web-site http://pointzip.org is really meant to house the
"generic" compressor someday and I am still waiting vor Dave (USACE)
or Paul (Elephant) to get back to me on that.

On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 2:36 AM, Stefan Keller <sfkeller at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Howard (and hello to Mateusz too)
>
> Thanks for your replies. I'm new to converting LIDAR data (I'm rather used
> to vector and raster conversion) but I thought I'm not the first one to
> process FARO Focus3d data.
>
> So my hope relies on a PTX->LAS conversion using Martin's pointzip before
> importing LAS->PostgreSQL/PostGIS/pointcloud).
>
> Or do you suggest to go back to the FARO device/software (which I don't have
> right now) and export to another format, which can be read then directly
> into PostgreSQL by PDAL (or another tool)?
>
> Yours, Stefan
> (Maintainer of http://geoconverter.hsr.ch)
>
>
> 2013/10/10 Howard Butler <howard at hobu.co>
>>
>>
>> On Oct 9, 2013, at 5:22 PM, Stefan Keller <sfkeller at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > I got data from a FARO Focus3d LIDAR scanner I think in PTS or PTX
>> > format.
>> > Does anybody have experiences in reading these formats - or at least
>> > converting them to LAS?
>> > I found pointzip [1] but I'd like to use PDAL since my target is
>> > PostgreSQL (pointcloud extension) and PDAL supports writing to this
>> > database.
>> >
>> > Yours, Stefan
>> >
>> > [1] http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/pointzip/
>>
>> PDAL doesn't support PTS or PTX at this time. The FARO folks would most
>> likely need to provide either a binary API so that a PDAL driver could be
>> written for their format(s), or alternatively, some sort of document(s)
>> describing the binary layout of the formats so that a driver could be
>> written.
>>
>> Sorry I can't be of more help.
>>
>> Howard
>>
>>
>