LASzip

LASzip, our award-winning open-source compression library for compressing LAS to LAZ, was developed by rapidlasso founder and lidar pioneer Dr. Martin Isenburg. LASzip is completely lossless: it compresses bulky LAS files into compact LAZ files that are only 7-20% of the original size, while accurately preserving every single bit. Likewise, LAZ files can be decompressed into a bitwise identical LAS file. LASzip allows compressed LAZ files to be treated like standard LAS files. They can be loaded directly from the compressed form into an application without first decompressing them to a disk.

Download the latest version

LASzip is included in our full download package and available as source code to be compiled in Windows, Linux or MacOS environments. LASzip is provided as an Apache 2.0-licensed standalone software library.

  • De-facto standard for compressed point clouds in the LiDAR industry.
  • Terrabytes of LAZ data are available for free download from countless agencies.
  • Winner of the 2012 Geospatial World Forum “Technology Innovation Award in LiDAR Processing”.
  • Runner-up for the “Most Innovative Product” at INTERGEO 2012.
  • The spec of LASzip can be found in this PDF.

LASzip compression can be much smaller & faster than generic compressors like bz2, gzip, and rar because it knows what the different bytes in a LAS file represent. The availability of the LASzip DLL and two APIs (libLAS & LASlib) with LASzip capability makes it easy to add native LAZ support to your software package.

Example: Compressing & decompressing the LAS file lidar.las with laszip.exe as shown below, results in lidar_copy.las that are bit-identical to lidar.las. However, the small size of lidar.laz makes it much easier to store, copy, transmit, or archive large amounts of LIDAR.

laszip -i lidar.las -o lidar.laz
laszip -i lidar.laz -o lidar_copy.las

This (incomplete) list shows software & providers that support the LAZ format:
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