The week after Easter is poised to see Latin America’s premier LiDAR event of 2015 when LAStools, CloudCompare, and OpenTopography converge for the 3 day NPAC 2015 workshop in CICESE in Mexico. Just across the US border (one hour South of Tijuana) lies the coastal town of Ensenada in Baja California where Dr. Alejandro Hinojosa has done magic to bring together (for the first time) a dynamic group of well-known LiDAR enthusiasts.
The action-packed event runs from April 8th to 10th and includes a full-day course on LiDAR with LAStools by Dr. Martin Isenburg of rapidlasso GmbH, a full-day tutorial on processing point clouds with CloudCompare by its creator Dr. Daniel Girardeau-Montaut, and a day of exciting talks on data portals, landslide detection, commerical drones, structure from motion, and much more. The NPAC 2015 workshop is open to all and registration is free thanks to sponsorship by CONACyT and CICESE. The main language of the workshop will be English.
About rapidlasso GmbH:
Technology powerhouse rapidlasso GmbH specializes in efficient LiDAR processing tools that are widely known for their high productivity. They combine robust algorithms with efficient I/O and clever memory management to achieve high throughput for data sets containing billions of points. The company’s flagship product – the LAStools software suite – has deep market penetration and is heavily used in industry, government agencies, research labs, and educational institutions. Visit http://rapidlasso.com for more information.
PRESS RELEASE October 7, 2013 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany
Just in time for INTERGEO 2013, the creators of LAStools and LASzip have partnered with LIDAR Technology Co., Ltd. of Zhubei City, Taiwan as their first exclusive reseller for the Taiwanese market. The two companies decided to strengthen their ties after holding a successful LiDAR processing workshop together with over 60 attendees following the International Symposium on Mobile Mapping Technologies (MMT 2013) in Tainan City last May. “We were looking for a partner with a strong technical mindset who is committed to capacity building,” says Dr. Martin Isenburg, founder of rapidlasso GmbH, “and LIDAR Technology Co., Ltd. is investing in R&D – including full waveform LiDAR – and has strong ties to academia. We couldn’t have found a better collaborator.” Dr. “James” Jin-King Liu, the CEO of LIDAR Technology Co., Ltd. concurs “our companies are a great match. LAStools is already widely popular in Taiwan, yet to employ them to their fullest potential can require some guidance. Our company has the technical expertise to provide this kind of support locally.”
About rapidlasso GmbH:
Technology start-up rapidlasso GmbH specializes in efficient LiDAR processing tools that are widely known for their high productivity. They combine robust algorithms with efficient I/O and clever memory management to achieve high throughput for data sets containing billions of points. The company’s flagship product – the LAStools software suite – has deep market penetration and is heavily used in industry, government agencies, research labs, and educational institutions. Visit http://rapidlasso.com for more information.
About LIDAR Technology Co., Ltd.:
LIDAR Technology Co., Ltd. was founded in 2010 out of the airborne LiDAR team of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), a National Laboratory in Taiwan. Their primary business is research, development, and application of earth observation, geoinformatics, and location-based services. LIDAR Technology Co., Ltd. performs acquisition, handling, and analysis of space-borne and airborne data with a focus on LiDAR, including full waveform, for which the company has developed own specialized solutions for their customers. Types of applications include mineral resources, geological mapping, geo-hazards studies, land-use and land-cover mapping, coastal zone mapping, forestry mapping, … visit http://www.lidar.com.tw for more information.
With CEO “James” Jin-King Liu and General Manager Ian Hsu in front of the office of LIDAR Technology Co., Ltd.
PRESS RELEASE
September 30, 2013 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany
At the code sprint following the FOSS4G 2013 conference, rapidlasso GmbH completed a toolbox that exposes the extensive LiDAR processing capabilities of the LAStools software suite within QGIS. QGIS (previously known as “Quantum GIS”) is a comprehensive desktop geographic information system that is free and open source software (FOSS). QGIS has seen rapid growth in acceptance as a viable and cost-effective alternative to the commerical ArcGIS products of ESRI. The newly integrated “Processing” framework (previously known as “SEXTANTE“) allows to combine the LiDAR functionality of LAStools with native raster and vector operations of QGIS as well as capabilities of other popular GIS packages such as GDAL, GRASS, SAGA, TauDEM, PostGIS and the (geo-)statistics package R. Detailed instructions on how to add the new LAStools toolbox to QGIS are available here.
About rapidlasso GmbH:
Technology start-up rapidlasso GmbH specializes in efficient LiDAR processing tools that are widely known for their high productivity. They combine robust algorithms with efficient I/O and clever memory management to achieve high throughput for data sets containing billions of points. The company’s flagship product – the LAStools software suite – has deep market penetration and is heavily used in industry, government agencies, research labs, and educational institutions. Visit http://rapidlasso.com for more information.
rapidlasso writing Python scripts at the FOSS4G 2013 code sprint in Nottingham, UK
screenshot of lasground as exposed via the new LAStools toolbox for QGIS
a DSM and 2 meter contours created with las2dem and las2iso using the new toolbox
PRESS RELEASE
August 22, 2013 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany
This week rapidlasso GmbH is exhibiting its LAStools LiDAR processing software in tropical Cairns (Australia) at the LiDAR Technologies 2013 conference that is emerging as the premier LiDAR event in Australia. This marks the first time that rapidlasso is acting as a sponsor with its own exhibition booth on the showfloor. During the technical program rapidlasso is providing an update on the recently released PulseWaves open data exchange format for storing full waveform LiDAR data. The PulseWaves DLL is now fully integrated into the RASP software of Airborne Research Australia (ARA) at Flinders University in Adelaide and full waveform data is showcased that was recently acquired by ARA as part of a TERNAUScover campaign.
About rapidlasso GmbH:
Technology start-up rapidlasso GmbH specializes in efficient LiDAR processing tools that are widely known for their high productivity. They combine robust algorithms with efficient I/O and clever memory management to achieve high throughput for data sets containing billions of points. The company’s flagship product – the LAStools software suite – has deep market penetration and is heavily used in industry, government agencies, research labs, and educational institutions. Visit http://rapidlasso.com for more information.
Having a laugh with Toby Clewett (Senior Geospatial Analyst at Sunshine Coast Regional Council) and Anne Henderson (catchement modeler and spatial analyst CSIRO Land and Water) at the rapidlasso booth
It seems Leica and Optech may have come a bit under “crossfire” (-: by the other big news (besides adding PulseWaves support to RiPROCESS) at the RIEGL LiDAR 2013 user conference in Vienna, namely the unveiling of the new LMS-Q1560 airborne laser scanner. Below you see the management team doing the ceremonial act.
The specification looks great and will especially make those happy looking for dense surveys in complex terrain or for more LiDAR returns from building facades in urban environments. By employing two units that “crossfire” at a particular angle while one unit looks forward and one backward, the combined system can provide a better point spacing on the ground and a better point coverage on vertical surfaces.
The new system combines two LMS-Q780 units each firing at rates of up 400 kHz via a shared rotating mirror in the center. The scan lines of the two laser-beam-emitting units are not perpendicular to the flight direction but angled at +12 and -12 degrees (actual number may be different) in the x-y plane to assure that they independently and consistently sample the covered terrain – unaffected from flying height or aircraft speed. Furthermore, the two fanning sheets of laser pulses are angled at +7 and -7 degrees (actual number may be different) in flight direction, meaning that one unit is forward-looking and the other backward-looking. This increases the likelihood that the sides of buildings are scanned as well. Colloquially put, those back-facing facades perpendicular to the flight direction that are not seen by the first round of laser pulses from the forward-looking unit will be hit by the second round of laser pulses from the backward-looking unit and vice-versa. The above details may not be 100% correct but are what I (wrongly?) remember from the technical presentation that Dr. Ullrich gave (see below).
The overall ability to sample so rapidly is realized by combining the “crossfire” that I have just described with the “rapidfire” of the earlier Q780 units. Each unit is able to operate with up to 10 pulses simultaneously in the air by subsequently resolving ambiguities off-line with the multiple-time-around (MTA) processing technique introduced for earlier models (see the product descriptions for the Q680i or the Q780 for more on that topic).
Hence, this new scanner with “crossfire technology” promises to give your terrain a dense cross examination … and yes, it is a full waveform scanner. (-:
Salzburg is a beautiful city in December. The European LiDAR Mapping Forum coincided with the days when the “Krampus” (= “Christmas monsters”) are roaming the Christmas markets in the old town to scare children and adults alike. One gave me a painful whipping in the legs with its leathery tail when I tried to protect a LAStools user … (-;
More to the point, here is my talk at ELMF 2012 on “LASindex – simple spatial indexing of LiDAR data”. I first give a little update on LASzip, then talk about spatial indexing with LAX, before sneak-previewing PulseWaves – our new and open LiDAR format for storing full waveform data.
Some more detail:
Airborne LiDAR surveys collect large amounts of elevations samples, often resulting in Terabytes of data. The acquired LiDAR points are typically stored and distributed in the LAS format or – its lossless compressed twin – the LAZ format. However, managing a folder of LAS or LAZ files is not a trivial task when a survey consists, for example, of 500 flight strips containing around 200 million points each. Even a simple area-of-interest (AOI) query requires opening all files and loading all those whose bounding box overlaps the queried AOI. One solution is to copy the survey into a dedicated data base such as Oracle Spatial or PostgreSQL. We present a much simpler alternative that works directly on the original LAS or LAZ files.
Our minimal-effort spatial indexing scheme has very small setup costs, avoids creating a second copy of the data, and is already in use in the LAStools software suite. For each LiDAR file we generate a tiny LAX file that resides in the same folder as the *.las or *.laz file and has the same name but with a *.lax extension. The LAX files are generally as small as 0.01 percent (for a LAS file) or 0.1 percent (for a LAZ file) of the file containing the LiDAR data and they can be generated as fast as the points can be read off disk.
The LAX files describe an adaptive quadtree over the x and y coordinates of all points. Each occupied quadtree cell stores a list of point index intervals that together reference all points falling into this cell. By merging all intervals of a cell that are less than 1000 apart in point index space we significantly reduce the number of intervals, the size of the LAX files, and the number of file seek operations.
Although individual cells typically reference too many points this is usually amortized as a typical AOI query will require returning a union of all intervals from many quadtree cells. However, our in-place spatial indexing relies on a certain degree of spatial coherency to be present in the point order. A simple measure of the efficiency of the existing order is to calculate the overhead factor when loading each quadtree cell individually from disk.
The source code for LASindex is part of the open source library LASlib of LAStools. It has been extensively field-tested in the LiDAR delivery pipeline of Open Topography (OT) where it is used to efficiently gather data from folders of LAZ files in accordance to area-of-interest queries that are generated by users via OT’s popular web-based LiDAR download interface. Another important use is on-the-fly point buffering. When batch processing, for example, 2km by 2km LiDAR tiles to create DTMs via rasterization of a temporary TIN, it is beneficial to load a 100 meter point buffer around each tile to avoid tile boundary artifacts. The presence of LAX files allows doing so efficiently on-the-fly.
PRESS RELEASE
October 5, 2012 rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany
The new technology start-up rapidlasso GmbH will make its first trade show appearance at next week’s INTERGEO 2012 in Hanover, Germany. The creators of LAStools and LASzip are hosted at the booth of the European Space Agency (ESA) as participants of a business incubation program by the ESA Technology Transfer Program and the Bavarian State Ministry for Economic Affairs, Infrastructure, Transport, and Technology (see also here). The new company will have a presentation titled “Efficient LiDAR processing with LAStools” at the ESA booth H.21 in Hall 7 on Wednesday, October 10th from 10:45 to 11:00.
The LiDAR processing tools from rapidlasso GmbH are widely known for their high productivity. They combine robust algorithm design with efficient I/O and clever memory management to achieve high throughput for data sets containing billions of points.
The company’s flagship product, the LAStools software suite, already has deep market penetration and is used in commercial sectors, government agencies, research labs, and educational institutions throughout the world. LAStools are a collection of highly efficient, batch-scriptable, multi-core command-line modules that can classify, filter, convert, quality check, tile, raster, triangulate, contour, clip, polygonize, etc. … LiDAR point clouds. Each tool also has a GUI and is available inside a LiDAR processing toolbox for ESRI’s ArcGIS versions 9.3, 10.0, and 10.1. See http://lastools.org for more details.
Meanwhile, rapidlasso’s open-source compressor – LASzip – has become an industry standard for compressed LiDAR. LASzip has won the 2012 Geospatial World Forum Technology Innovation Award in Amsterdam earlier this year and is nominated as one of the ten most innovative products competing for the 2012 Wichmann Innovation Award at INTERGEO this year. The compressed LAZ format produced by LASzip has native read and write support in several major software packages such as QT Modeler, TopoDOT, Global Mapper, FME 2012, RiProcess, Pointools (upcoming) and others will be adding support soon.
As an enabling technology the “free” LASzip compressor provides relief for many data-heavy workflows. For example, the Minnesota Department for Natural Resources provides free access to the LiDAR of more than 60 counties in the LAZ format and continuously adds more. the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) offers LAZ as a download option for LiDAR from their servers, and the entire LiDAR inventory of the National Survey of Finland that was published as part of the new “open data” policy is available exclusively in the LAZ format. On a county, a state, or a national scale – using compressed LAZ instead of standard LAS means savings on the order of Terabytes or even Petabytes – data that no longer needs to be hosted, backed-up, and served for download. See http://laszip.org for more details.
Here is a video of my talk at ELMF 2011 on “LASzip: lossless compression of LiDAR data”.
Airborne or mobile laser scanning technology (LiDAR) collects billions of xyz points that are typically stored in the LAS(er) format. LASzip is a lossless compressor to turn large LAS into smaller LAZ files. Encoding and decoding speeds are 1 to 4 millions points per second and compressed files are only 7 to 25 percent of the original size.Compression and decompression happen on-the-fly in a streaming manner and random-access is supported. A reference implementation unencumbered by patents or intellectual property concerns is freely available with an LGPL-license here.
rapidlasso GmbH 