So your LiDAR processing workflow produces beautiful LAS or LAZ output. You think the files are nothing short of perfect. But they are in LAS 1.2 format and the tender document explicitly requests delivery in the latest LAS 1.4 format. The free and open source las2las module of LAStools – also known as the Swiss Army knife of LiDAR processing – can easily up-convert them.

There are two possible scenarios: (1) The client wants the data as LAS 1.4 files but does not care about which point type is used. (2) The client wants LAS 1.4 and specifically asks for one of the new point types such as point type 6.

Let us assume you have LAS 1.2 content with point type 1 like these LAZ files from Martin county in Minnesota. Use these four tiles 5126-05-42.laz, 5126-05-43.laz, 5126-06-42.laz, and 5126-06-43.laz to repeat the LAS 1.4 up-conversion we are doing in the following. You will need to use version 160110 of LAStools (or newer) that you can download here.

A report generated with lasinfo shows geo-referencing information stored as GeoTIFF keys in the first VLR. Then there are 10 useless numbers stored in the second VLR that seem left-over from an earlier version of geo-referencing without EPSG codes. The two vendor-specific ‘NIIRS10’ VLRs should probably be removed unless they are meaningful to you. The LAS header is followed by 1564 user-defined bytes (sometimes used as “padding”) that we can also delete before delivery.

D:\LAStools\bin>lasinfo -i martin\5126-05-42.laz
reporting all LAS header entries:
 file signature: 'LASF'
 file source ID: 0
 global_encoding: 0
 project ID GUID data 1-4: E603549E-B74A-4696-3BAD-EA49F643C221
 version major.minor: 1.2
 system identifier: 'LAStools (c) by Martin Isenburg'
 generating software: 'lassort (110815) unlicensed'
 file creation day/year: 119/2011
 header size: 227
 offset to point data: 2163
 number var. length records: 4
 point data format: 1
 point data record length: 28
 number of point records: 13772409
 number of points by return: 13440460 240598 78743 12608 0
 scale factor x y z: 0.01 0.01 0.01
 offset x y z: 0 0 0
 min x y z: 361818.33 4855898.31 349.89
 max x y z: 364400.98 4859420.79 404.22
variable length header record 1 of 4:
 reserved 43707
 user ID 'LASF_Projection'
 record ID 34735
 length after header 40
 description 'by LAStools of Martin Isenburg'
 GeoKeyDirectoryTag version 1.1.0 number of keys 4
 key 1024 tiff_tag_location 0 count 1 value_offset 1 - GTModelTypeGeoKey: ModelTypeProjected
 key 3072 tiff_tag_location 0 count 1 value_offset 26915 - ProjectedCSTypeGeoKey: NAD83 / UTM 15N
 key 3076 tiff_tag_location 0 count 1 value_offset 9001 - ProjLinearUnitsGeoKey: Linear_Meter
 key 4099 tiff_tag_location 0 count 1 value_offset 9001 - VerticalUnitsGeoKey: Linear_Meter
variable length header record 2 of 4:
 reserved 43707
 user ID 'LASF_Projection'
 record ID 34736
 length after header 80
 description 'GeoTiff double parameters'
 GeoDoubleParamsTag (number of doubles 10)
 500000 0 -93 0.9996 0 1 6.37814e+006 298.257 0 0.0174533
variable length header record 3 of 4:
 reserved 43707
 user ID 'NIIRS10'
 record ID 1
 length after header 26
 description 'NIIRS10 Tile Index'
variable length header record 4 of 4:
 reserved 43707
 user ID 'NIIRS10'
 record ID 4
 length after header 10
 description 'NIIRS10 Timestamp'
the header is followed by 1564 user-defined bytes
LASzip compression (version 2.1r0 c2 50000): POINT10 2 GPSTIME11 2
reporting minimum and maximum for all LAS point record entries ...
 X 36181833 36440098
 Y 485589831 485942079
 Z 34989 40422
 intensity 1 4780
 return_number 1 4
 number_of_returns 1 4
 edge_of_flight_line 0 0
 scan_direction_flag 0 1
 classification 1 10
 scan_angle_rank -24 24
 user_data 0 32
 point_source_ID 5401 8015
 gps_time 243852.663596 403514.323142
number of first returns: 13440460
number of intermediate returns: 91408
number of last returns: 13440349
number of single returns: 13199808
overview over number of returns of given pulse: 13199808 323647 198449 50505 0 0 0
histogram of classification of points:
 6560507 unclassified (1)
 6744481 ground (2)
 401464 medium vegetation (4)
 55433 building (6)
 100 noise (7)
 10157 water (9)
 267 rail (10)

(1) Create LAS 1.4 files with point type 1

The las2las command shown below turns a folder of LAS 1.2 files into a folder of  LAS 1.4 files with option ‘-set_version 1.4’ without changing the point type. It removes the last three VLRs with option ‘-remove_vlrs_from_to 1 3’ and the user-defined bytes in the LAS header with option ‘-remove_padding’ (*). The result is as LAZ with option ‘-olaz’ and the task is run on up to 4 CPUs in parallel with option ‘-cores 4’.

(*) option ‘-remove_padding’ is called  ‘-remove_extra’ in older versions of LAStools.

las2las -i martin/*.laz ^
        -remove_vlrs_from_to 1 3 ^
        -remove_padding ^
        -set_version 1.4 ^
        -odir martin_LAS14_pt1 -olaz ^
        -cores 4

(2) Create LAS 1.4 files with point type 6

The las2las command shown below turns a folder of LAS 1.2 files into a folder of  LAS 1.4 files with option ‘-set_version 1.4’ and changes the point type from 1 to 6 with option ‘-set_point_type 6’. As before some VLRs and the header padding is removed. It also adds a second description of the georeferencing information by rewriting the existing information stored as GeoTIFF tags into a properly formatted OGC WKT string with option ‘-set_ogc_wkt’. Thanks to ESRI’s assault on the LAZ format the output still needs to be in LAS. It can be compressed with laszip in a subsequent step using the ‘LAS 1.4 compatibility mode‘ sponsored by NOAA.

las2las -i martin/*.laz ^
        -remove_vlrs_from_to 1 3 ^
        -remove_padding ^
        -set_version 1.4 ^
        -set_point_type 6 ^
        -set_ogc_wkt ^
        -odir martin_LAS14_pt6 -olas ^
        -cores 4

laszip -i martin_LAS14_pt6/*.las -cores 4

Below the output of lasinfo for the “upgraded” LAS 1.4 file with the OGC WKT string. Some of the key changes have been marked in red.

D:\LAStools\bin>lasinfo -i martin_LAS14_pt6\5126-05-42.las
reporting all LAS header entries:
 file signature: 'LASF'
 file source ID: 0
 global_encoding: 16
 project ID GUID data 1-4: E603549E-B74A-4696-3BAD-EA49F643C221
 version major.minor: 1.4
 system identifier: 'LAStools (c) by rapidlasso GmbH'
 generating software: 'las2las (version 160110)'
 file creation day/year: 119/2011
 header size: 375
 offset to point data: 1135
 number var. length records: 2
 point data format: 6
 point data record length: 30
 number of point records: 0
 number of points by return: 0 0 0 0 0
 scale factor x y z: 0.01 0.01 0.01
 offset x y z: 0 0 0
 min x y z: 361818.33 4855898.31 349.89
 max x y z: 364400.98 4859420.79 404.22
 start of waveform data packet record: 0
 start of first extended variable length record: 0
 number of extended_variable length records: 0
 extended number of point records: 13772409
 extended number of points by return: 13440460 240598 78743 12608 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
variable length header record 1 of 2:
 reserved 43707
 user ID 'LASF_Projection'
 record ID 34735
 length after header 40
 description 'by LAStools of Martin Isenburg'
 GeoKeyDirectoryTag version 1.1.0 number of keys 4
 key 1024 tiff_tag_location 0 count 1 value_offset 1 - GTModelTypeGeoKey: ModelTypeProjected
 key 3072 tiff_tag_location 0 count 1 value_offset 26915 - ProjectedCSTypeGeoKey: NAD83 / UTM 15N
 key 3076 tiff_tag_location 0 count 1 value_offset 9001 - ProjLinearUnitsGeoKey: Linear_Meter
 key 4099 tiff_tag_location 0 count 1 value_offset 9001 - VerticalUnitsGeoKey: Linear_Meter
variable length header record 2 of 2:
 reserved 43707
 user ID 'LASF_Projection'
 record ID 2112
 length after header 612
 description 'by LAStools of rapidlasso GmbH'
 WKT OGC COORDINATE SYSTEM:
 PROJCS["NAD83 / UTM 15N",GEOGCS["NAD83",DATUM["North_American_Datum_1983",SPHEROID["GRS 1980",6378137,298.257222101,AUTHORITY["EPSG","7019"]],AUTHORITY["EPSG","6269"]],PRIMEM["Greenwich",0,AUTHORITY["EPSG","8901"]],UNIT["degree",0.01745329251994328,AUTHORITY["EPSG","9122"]],AUTHORITY["EPSG","4269"]],PROJECTION["Transverse_Mercator"],PARAMETER["latitude_of_origin",0],PARAMETER["central_meridian",-93],PARAMETER["scale_factor",0.9996],PARAMETER["false_easting",500000],PARAMETER["false_northing",0],UNIT["metre",1,AUTHORITY["EPSG","9001"]],AXIS["Easting",EAST],AXIS["Northing",NORTH],AUTHORITY["EPSG","26915"]]
reporting minimum and maximum for all LAS point record entries ...
 X 36181833 36440098
 Y 485589831 485942079
 Z 34989 40422
 intensity 1 4780
 return_number 1 4
 number_of_returns 1 4
 edge_of_flight_line 0 0
 scan_direction_flag 0 1
 classification 1 10
 scan_angle_rank -24 24
 user_data 0 32
 point_source_ID 5401 8015
 gps_time 243852.663596 403514.323142
 extended_return_number 1 4
 extended_number_of_returns 1 4
 extended_classification 1 10
 extended_scan_angle -4000 4000
 extended_scanner_channel 0 0
number of first returns: 13440460
number of intermediate returns: 91408
number of last returns: 13440349
number of single returns: 13199808
overview over extended number of returns of given pulse: 13199808 323647 198449 50505 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
histogram of classification of points:
 6560507 unclassified (1)
 6744481 ground (2)
 401464 medium vegetation (4)
 55433 building (6)
 100 noise (7)
 10157 water (9)
 267 rail (10)

Andreas Konring and Susanne Bjerg Petersen (recipients of three LASmoons)
Department of Environmental Engineering
Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, DENMARK

Background:
Copenhagen has in the recent years experienced severe floodings due to cloudbursts which has increased the focus of climate adaption and the implementation of green infrastructure. The use of sustainable urban drainage system (SUDS) solutions to divert stormwater from the existing drainage system will be a central measure to increase the climate resilience while greenifying the city and Copenhagen municipality is investing 700 million euros in SUDS projects alone. Additionally, the city has decided to plant 100.000 new trees in the next 10 years as another measure to enhance natural amenities but also because of air cleansing and cooling effects. However, it has not been investigated what effect the current canopy cover has on the rainwater retention due to increased evaporation and soil infiltration and if planting more trees could help improve the pluvial flooding issues.

Example of a pit-free CHM in an urban environment.

Goal:
This study aims to estimate the current number of trees and extract tree metrics such as volume, canopy cover and densities with the use of the national LIDAR dataset and NIR ortophotos from summer and spring. These canopy metrics will be used to inform a simple tree model which will be implemented in a 2-D overland flow model to assess the effect of trees on flood mitigation. The created CHM could also be used in further analysis of the urban heat island effect.

Data:
+ 100 square kilometers of the Danish national LiDAR dataset collected in November 2014 covering the municipality of Copenhagen.
+  density of 4 – 5 last-returns per square meter
+  classified into surface (1), ground (2), vegetation (3,4,5), buildings (6), noise (7) and water (9).

LAStools processing:
1) create square tiles with buffer to avoid edge artifacts [lastile]
2) generate DTMs and DSMs with only buildings and terrain [las2dem]
3).normalize height, remove outliers and keep classes 2, 5 and 6 [lasheight]
4) create rasters with forest metrics [lascanopy]
5) calculate the pit-free Canopy Height Model (CHM) proposed by Khosravipour et al. (2014) [lasthin, las2dem, lasgrid]

Reference:
Copenhagen Municipality, 2011. Copenhagen Climate Adaption Plan.
Geodatastyrelsen, 2014. Danmarks højdemodel, DHM/Punktsky – Dataversion 2.0 januar 2015. Product specification.
Khosravipour, A., Skidmore, A.K., Isenburg, M., Wang, T.J., Hussin, Y.A., 2014. Generating pit-free Canopy Height Models from Airborne LiDAR. PE&RS = Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 80, 863-872.

A Digital Surface Model (DSM) represents the elevation of the landscape including all vegetation and man-made objects. An easy way to generate a DSM raster from LiDAR is to use the highest elevation value from all points falling into each grid cell. However, this “binning” approach only works when then the resolution of the LiDAR is higher than the resolution of the raster. Only then sufficiently many LiDAR points fall into each raster cell to prevent “empty pixels” and “data pits” from forming. For example, given LiDAR with an average pulse spacing of 0.5 meters one can easily generate a 2.5 meter DSM raster with simple “binning”. But to generate a 0.5 meter DSM raster we need to use an “interpolation” method.

Laser pulses and discrete returns of four fightlines.

For the past twenty or so years, GIS textbooks and LiDAR tutorials have recommened to use only the first returns to construct the interpolating surface for DSM generation. The intuition is that the first return is the highest return for an airborne survey where the laser beams come (more or less) from above. Hence, an interpolating surface of all first returns is constructed – usually based on a 2D Delaunay triangulation – and the resulting Triangular Irregular Network (TIN) is rasterized onto a grid at a user-specified resolution to create the DSM raster. The same way a Canopy Height Model (CHM) is generated except that elevations are height-normalized either before or after the rasterization step. However, using a first-return interpolation for DSM/CHM generation has two critical drawbacks:

(1) Using only first returns means not all LiDAR information is used and some detail is missing. This is particularly the case for off-nadir scan angles in traditional airborne surveys. It becomes more pronounced with new scanning systems such as UAV or hand-held LiDAR where laser beams no longer come “from above”. Furthermore, in the event of clouds or high noise the first returns are often removed and the remaining returns are not renumbered. Hence, any laser shot whose first return reflects from a cloud or a bird does not contribute its highest landscape hit to the DSM or CHM.

(2) Using all first returns practically guarantees the formation of needle-shaped triangles in vegetated areas and along building roofs that appear as spikes in the TIN. This is because at off-nadir scan angles first returns are often generated far below other first returns as shown in the illustration above. The resulting spikes turn into “data pits” in the corresponding raster that not only look ugly but impact the utility of the DSM or CHM in subsequent analysis, for example, in forestry applications when attempting to extract individual trees.

In the following we present results and command-line examples for the new “spike-free” algorithm by (Khosravipour et. al, 2015, 2016) that is implemented (as a slow prototype) in the current LAStools release. This completely novel method for DSM generation triangulates all relevant LiDAR returns using Contrained Delaunay algorithm. This constructs a “spike-free” TIN that is in turn rasterized into “pit-free” DSM or CHM. This work is both a generalization and an improvement of our previous result of pit-free CHM generation.

We now compare our “spike-free” DSM to a “first-return” DSM on the two small urban data sets “france.laz” and “zurich.laz” distributed with LAStools. Using lasinfo with options ‘-last_only’ and ‘-cd’ we determine that the average pulse spacing is around 0.33 meter for “france.laz” and 0.15 meter for “zurich.laz”. We decide to create a hillshaded 0.25 meter DSM for “france.laz” and a 0.15 meter DSM for “zurich.laz” with the command-lines shown below.

las2dem -i ..\data\france.laz ^
        -keep_first ^
        -step 0.25 ^
        -hillshade ^
        -o france_fr.png

las2dem -i ..\data\france.laz ^
        -spike_free 0.9 ^
        -step 0.25 ^
        -hillshade ^
        -o france_sf.png

las2dem -i ..\data\zurich.laz ^
           -keep_first ^
           -step 0.15 ^
           -hillshade ^
           -o zurich_fr.png

las2dem -i ..\data\zurich.laz ^
        -spike_free 0.5 ^
        -step 0.15 ^
        -hillshade ^
        -o zurich_sf.png

The differences between a first-return DSM and a spike-free DSM are most drastic along building roofs and in vegetated areas. To inspect in more detail the differences between a first-return and our spike-free TIN we use lasview that allows to iteratively visualize the construction process of a spike-free TIN.

lasview -i ..\data\france.laz -spike_free 0.9

Pressing <f> and <t> constructs the first-return TIN. Pressing <SHIFT> + <t> destroys the first-return TIN. Pressing <SHIFT> + <y> constructs the spike-free TIN. Pressing <y> once destroys the spike-free TIN. Pressing <y> many times iteratively constructs the spike-free TIN.

One crucial piece of information is still missing. What value should you use as the freeze constraint of the spike-free algorithm that we set to 0.9 for “france.laz” and to 0.5 for “zurich.laz” as the argument to the command-line option ‘-spike_free’. The optimal value is related to the expected edge-length and we found the 99th percentile of a histogram of edge lengths of the last-return TIN to be useful. Or simpler … try a value that is about three times the average pulse spacing.

References:
Khosravipour, A., Skidmore, A.K., Isenburg, M. and Wang, T.J. (2015) Development of an algorithm to generate pit-free Digital Surface Models from LiDAR, Proceedings of SilviLaser 2015, pp. 247-249, September 2015.
Khosravipour, A., Skidmore, A.K., Isenburg, M (2016) Generating spike-free Digital Surface Models using raw LiDAR point clouds: a new approach for forestry applications, (journal manuscript under review).

PRESS RELEASE (for immediate release)
February 18, 2016
rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany

Just in time for ILMF 2016, the makers of the open LASzip LiDAR compressor annouce the latest addition to their LiDAR processing software LAStools. The new ‘laspublish‘ from rapidlasso GmbH creates stand-alone Web Portals for interactive 3D viewing of LiDAR points and for selective downloading of LAZ or LAS files. The new tool is based on the cutting-edge streaming point cloud viewing technology of Potree that optimizes large LiDAR point clouds for streaming via the Web such that anyone can visualize, explore, and (optionally) download them with any modern browser.

3D viewer and download portal created with ‘laspublish’

The interactive 3D viewer streams on demand only the relevant parts of the point clouds. It not only visualizes the LiDAR in many useful and intuitive ways, but is also equipped with measurement tools to calculate distances or areas and profile or clipping tools for close-up inspections. With its integrated LASzip compression, options to color LiDAR by classification, return type, intensity, and point source ID, stunning visuals via Eye Dome Lighting (EDL), and the optional 2D download map, the new ‘laspublish‘ empowers professional and novice users alike to create stand-alone LiDAR Webportals with just a few button clicks.

a few clicks and ‘laspublish’ creates a professional LiDAR portal

The new ‘laspublish‘ is now an integral part of the LAStools software and is bundled together with all necessary components of the Potree software. It provides an instant and cost-effective solution for generating a set of Web pages that realize a self-contained LiDAR portal offering interactive online visualization and exploration as well as easy and intuitive distribution of large LiDAR data sets via the optional download map.

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. As the only Diamond sponsor, rapidlasso GmbH has been the main financial supporter of the open source Potree package by Markus Schütz over the past two years.

About Potree:
Potree is a WebGL based viewer for large point clouds. The project evolved as a Web based viewer from the Scanopy desktop point cloud renderer by TU Wien, Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms. It will continue to be free and open source with a FreeBSD license to enable anyone to view, analyze and publicly share their large datasets. Visit http://potree.org for more information.

Asanga Ramanayake (recipient of three LASmoons)
BGSU Remote Sensing Lab, School of Earth, Environment and Society
Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA

Background:
Lake Erie is the Southern most of the Great Lakes and it is shared by 4 states and 2 countries. It is the shallowest, warmest, and most biologically productive of all the Great Lakes. At wetland habitats along the Western Lake Erie coast, more than 300 species of plants have been identified. To study land use and to classify vegetation cover it is important to consider the vertical distribution of the vegetation. LiDAR is an active data collection system for generating 3D spatial information of objects. High-resolution Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) and Digital Surface Models (DSMs) can be generated from the available LiDAR points that allow accurate estimates of canopy height.

Goal:
The main goal of this project is to derive Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) and Digital Surface Models (DSMs) for the coastal areas of Lake Erie using LIDAR data to estimate the height of the canopy. The derived products will be validated with in-situ measurements from other researchers and compared with ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model data.

coastal area LiDAR data coverage for Lake Erie

Data:
+ The Ohio Geographically Referenced Information Program (OGRIP) has free downloadable LIDAR data in LAS format that was acquired by Ohio Statewide Imagery Program (OSIP) in 2006-2008.
+ In 2011-2012 NOAA’s mission was capturing coastal area LiDAR data. This data is served to the public and available in LAZ format.

LAStools processing:
1) create square tiles to avoid edge artifacts [lastile]
2) classify point clouds into ground and non-ground [lasground]
3) generate DTMs and DSMs for the coastal areas of Lake Erie [las2dem]
4).produce height normalized tiles [lasheight]
5) generate a Canopy Height Model (CHM) using the pit-free method of Khosravipour et al. (2014) [lasthin, las2dem, lasgrid]

Reference:
Herdendorf, Charles E. The ecology of the coastal marshes of western Lake Erie: a community profile. OHIO STATE UNIV COLUMBUS, 1987.
Deems, Jeffrey S., Thomas H. Painter, and David C. Finnegan. “Lidar Measurement of Snow Depth: A Review.” Journal of Glaciology 59.215 (2013): 467–479. IngentaConnect. Web.
Jensen, John R. Remote Sensing of the Environment: An Earth Resource Perspective. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007. Print. Prentice Hall Series in Geographic Information Science.
Khosravipour, A., Skidmore, A.K., Isenburg, M., Wang, T.J., Hussin, Y.A., 2014. Generating pit-free Canopy Height Models from Airborne LiDAR. PE&RS = Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 80, 863-872.

Visiting our users on-site, such as last week at Mariano Marcos State University in Ilocos Norte in the Philippines, we sometimes come across situations as pictured below where the intensity values of the returns of one flightline are drastically different from that of other flightlines.

The intensity of returns in the left most flightline is different from that of other flightlines.

Using intensity rasters with such dark strips as an additional input for land cover classification may likely make things worse. Radiometrically “correct” intensity calibration is a complex topic and may not always be possible to do using only the LAZ files without meta information such as the internals of the scanning system and the aircraft trajectory. However, we now describe a “quick and dirty” fix to the situation shown above so that the intensity grids (that were computed as averages of first return intensities) at least “look” as sensible as for the one square tile (shown below) that was corrected by a simple multiplication with 5 for all intensities of the dark strip.

Simply multiplying all intensities of the dark flightline with 5 seems to “fix” the issue for our test tile.

The number 5 was determined by a quick glance at the intensity histograms that we can generate with lasinfo. We decide to only look at single returns as we expect them to have a higher correlation: Their locations are more likely to be “seen similarly” from and their energy is more likely “reflected similarly” to different flightlines compared to that of multiple returns.

lasinfo -i strip1.laz strip2.laz strip3.laz ^
        -keep_single ^
        -histo intensity 1 ^
        -nmm -nh -nv ^
        -odix _histo_int -otxt

The resulting histograms for the dark ‘strip1.laz’ is quite different from that of the much brighter ‘strip2.laz’ and ‘strip3.laz’. The average single return intensity for the dark ‘strip1.laz’ is a meager 5.13 whereas the  brighter ‘strip2.laz’ and ‘strip3.laz’ have similar averages of 24.15 and 24.50 respectively.

Draw your own conclusion about which scale factor to use. We have the choice to match either the peak of the histograms or their averages. Scaling the peak of 3 for ‘strip1.laz’ to match the 25 of the other two strips is too much of an upscaling. But the average 24.15 divided by 5.13 gives a potential scale of 4.71 and the average 24.50 divided by 5.13 gives a potential scale of 4.77 and we already saw a multiplication by 5 giving reasonable results. So this is how we can fix the intensity:

las2las -i strip1.laz ^
        -scale_intensity 4.75 ^
        -odix _corr_int -olaz

But what if your data is already in tiles? How can you adjust only the intensity of those returns that are from the flightline 1? Assuming that your flightline information is properly stored in the point source ID field of every point this is easily done with the new ‘-filtered_transform’ in LAStools using las2las on as many cores as you have as follows:

las2las -i tiles/*.laz ^
        -keep_point_source 1 ^
        -filtered_transform ^
        -scale_intensity 4.75 ^
        -odir tiles_corr -olaz ^
        -cores 8

This is not currently exposed in the GUI of las2las but you can simply add it by typing it into the ‘RUN’ pop-up window as shown below.

Scaling only the intensities of flightline 1 by 4.9 using the new ‘-filtered_transform’.

After this “quick and dirty” intensity correction we again ran lasgrid as follows:

lasgrid -i tiles_corr/*.laz ^
        -gray -set_min_max 0 60 ^
        -odir tiles_int_rasters -opng ^
        -cores 8

And the result is shown below. The obvious flightline-induced discontinuity in the intensities has pretty much disappeared. Do you have similar flightline-related intensity issues? We like to hear from you whether this technique works or if we need to implement something more clever in the future …

Jakob Iglhaut (recipient of three LASmoons)
Program for Geospatial Information Management
Carinthia University of Applied Sciences, Villach, AUSTRIA

Background:
As part of the EU LIFE programme two river stretches in Carinthia, Austria have recently been subject to restoration measures. The LIFE-project aims at protecting valuable riverine flora and fauna while improving flood protection. By remodelling the river beds, the construction of groynes and still water bodies the river environment was directed to more natural morphology and state. The joint R&D project “Remotely Piloted Aircraft Multi Sensor System (RPAMSS)” aims at capturing multi-dimensional environmental data in order to monitor the development of these rivers stretches in a holistic way. Flights with an RTK capable fixed wing UAV are carried out at a particular section of the rivers Gail and Drau respectively. The project site at the Upper-Drau is located in the area of Obergottesfeld, Austria (560m ASL), with an area currently remotely monitored by the RPAmSS of approximately 3.5km². The second study area is located close to Feistritz at the river Gail (550m ASL) with an area of approx. 0.9km². Apart from being addressed by the LIFE project both study areas are also defined as NATURA 2000 nature protection sites. In both areas frequent UAV flights are carried out collecting high-resolution multi-spectral imagery. Structure from Motion photogrammetry enables the creation of high-density multi-spectral point clouds.

Goal:
The aim of the project is to assess the morphology and related temporal changes of the described riverine environment based on SfM point clouds. A full processing chain will be developed to take full advantage of the high-density data. Particular interest lies in the extraction of ground points underneath vegetation in leaf-on/leaf-off. Ground points will be gridded to generate DTMs. The qualitative performance of the data will be held against an ALS acquired DTM. Furthermore forest metrics will be extracted for the riparian zone in order to quantify their current state and changes.

Data:
+ High-density multi-spectral (R,G,B,NIR) SfM derived point clouds (UAS imagery)
+ Variable point densities, GSD ~3cm.

LAStools processing:
1) fix SfM owing incoherence [lassort]
2) create 100m tiles (10m buffer) for parallel processing [lastile]
3) noise removal introduced by the SfM algorithm [lasnoise]
4).extract ground points [lasground_new]
5) generate normalized above heights [lasheight]
6) classify based on height-above-ground (low veg, high veg) [lasheight]
7) create DSM and DTM [blast2dem]
8) generate a Canopy Height Model (CHM) using the pit-free method of Khosravipour et al. (2014) with the workflow described here [lasthin, las2dem, lasgrid]
9) sub-sample the point clouds for other (spectral) analyses [lassplit, lasthin, lasmerge]

Reference:
Westoby, M. J., et al. “Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry: A low-cost, effective tool for geoscience applications.” Geomorphology 179 (2012): 300-314.
Fonstad, Mark A., et al. “Topographic structure from motion: a new development in photogrammetric measurement.” Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 38.4 (2013): 421-430.
Khosravipour, A., Skidmore, A.K., Isenburg, M., Wang, T.J., Hussin, Y.A., 2014. Generating pit-free Canopy Height Models from Airborne LiDAR. PE&RS = Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 80, 863-872.
Javernick, L., J. Brasington, and B. Caruso. “Modeling the topography of shallow braided rivers using Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry.” Geomorphology 213 (2014): 166-182.

Patricia Andrade (recipient of three LASmoons)
Earth Sciences Division
CICESE, MEXICO

Background:
The relief in the northwest coast of Baja California is subject to different processes. One process that has a major impact are landslides. The near-shore landslides have been a significant problem because this area coincides with the location of the Tijuana-Ensenada Scenic highway which is one of the main routes between Tijuana and Ensenada. On 28 December 2013 a rotational slip in the stretch of 93 km caused the closure of the Tijuana-Ensenada highway. Several measurements with emerging techniques such as photogrammetry by drones and terrestrial and airborne LiDAR surveys were taken since the landslide. From airborne LiDAR point clouds of different dates DTM are created and used to estimate differences (James, 2012). From terrestrial LiDAR point clouds the characteristics of planes and lines (i.e. striations) on the footwall are determined. An analysis of such geomorphological processes can facilitate a rapid response and help to reopen the highways faster.

TLS point cloud of the landslide in the stretch km93 +50 (January 2014).

Goal:
The main goal of this project is to estimate the volume change on the landslide’s day and later years from digital terrain models (DTMs) of pre-event data (2006) and post-event (2013, 2014 and 2016). A second goal is to create a model of surface strain from TLS data and a point cloud (2013).

Data:
+ DTM of 2006 (pre-event) from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI).
+ relief data of the day of landslide (2013) obtained by photogrammetry from 144 photos taken with a DJi S800 drone.
+ DTM from January 2014 aquired by satellite photogrammetry of images from GeoEye 1.
+ 11 TLS point clouds scanned and co-registered in February 2014  with a Faro Focus 3D x330.
+ NCALM aerial LiDAR captured In July 2014 of th landslide zone.
+ highway rehabilitation data taken in March 2016 from RGB / NIR photos of eBee drone flights.

LAStools processing:
1) create square tiles with buffers [lastile]
2) classify isolated points as noise [lasnoise]
3) classify points clouds into ground and non-ground [lasground]
4).generate DTMs from ground-classified points [las2dem]
5) change the resolution of DEMs [lasgrid]
6) create hillshades of the DTMs [blast2dem]

References:
James, L. A., Hodgson, M. E., Ghoshal, S., Latiolais, M. M., 2012. Geomorphic change detection using historic maps and DEM differencing: The temporal dimension of geospatial analysis. Geomorphology 137, 181-198.

Jane Meiforth (recipient of three LASmoons)
Environmental Remote Sensing and Geoinformatics
University of Trier, GERMANY

Background:
The New Zealand Kauri trees (or Agathis australis) are under threat by the so called Kauri dieback disease. This disease is caused by a fungi like spore, which blocks the transport for nutrition and water in the trunk and finally kills the trees. Symptoms of the disease in the canopy like dropping of leaves and bare branches offer an opportunity for analysing the state of the disease by remote sensing. The study site covers three areas in the Waitakere Ranges, west of Auckland with Kauri trees in different growth and health classes.

Goal:
The main objective of this study is to identify Kauri trees and canopy symptoms of the disease by remote sensing, in order to support the monitoring of the disease. In the first step LAStools will be used to extract the tree crowns and describe their characteristics based on height metrics, shapes and intensity values from airborne LiDAR data. In the second step, the spectral characteristics of the tree crowns will be analyzed based on very high resolution satellite data (WV02 and WV03). Finally the best describing spatial and spectral parameters will be combined in an object based classification, in order to identify the Kauri trees and different states of the disease..

Data:
+ high resolution airborne LiDAR data (15-35p/sqm, ground classified) taken in January 2016
+ 15cm RGB aerial images taken on the same flight as the LIDAR data
+ ground truth field data from 2100 canopy trees in the study areas, recorded January – March 2016
+ helicopter images taken in January – April 2016 from selected Kauri trees by Auckland Council
+ vector layers with infrastructure data like roads and hiking tracks

LAStools processing:
1) create square tiles with edge length of 1000 m and a 25 m buffer to avoid edge artifacts [lastile]
2) generate DTMs and DSMs [las2dem]
3).produce height normalized tiles [lasheight]
4) generate a pit-free Canopy Height Model (CHM) using the method of Khosravipour et al. (2014) with the workflow described here [lasthin, las2dem, lasgrid]
5) extract crown polygons based on the pit-free CHM [inverse watershed method in GIS, las2iso]
6) normalize the points of each crown with constant ground elevation to avoid slope effects [lasclip, las2las with external source for the ground elevation]
7) derive height metrics for each crown on base of the normalized crown points [lascanopy]
8) derive intensity statistics for the crown points [lascanopy with ‘-int_avg’, ‘-int_std’ etc. on first returns]
9) derive metrics correlated with the dropping of leaves like canopy density, canopy cover and gap fraction for the crown points [lascanopy with ‘–cov’, ‘–dns’, ‘–gap’, ‘–fraction’]

Reference:
Hu B, Li J, Jing L, Judah A. Improving the efficiency and accuracy of individual tree crown delineation from high-density LiDAR data. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation. 2014; 26: 145-55.
Khosravipour, A., Skidmore, A.K., Isenburg, M., Wang, T.J., Hussin, Y.A., 2014. Generating pit-free Canopy Height Models from Airborne LiDAR. PE&RS = Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 80, 863-872.
Li J, Hu B, Noland TL. Classification of tree species based on structural features derived from high density LiDAR data. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology. 2013; 171-172: 104-14.
MPI New Zealand http://www.kauridieback.co.nz – website with information on the kauri dieback disease
Vauhkonen, J., Ene, L., Gupta, S., Heinzel, J., Holmgren, J., Pitkänen, J., Solberg, S., Wang, Y., Weinacker, H., Hauglin, K. M., Lien, V., Packalén, P., Gobakken, T., Koch, B., Næsset, E., Tokola, T. and Maltamo, M. (2012) Comparative testing of single-tree detection algorithms under different types of forest. Forestry, 85, 27-40.

Stéphane Henriod (recipient of three LASmoons)
National Statistical Committee of the Kyrgyz Republic
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

This pilot study is part of the International Climate Initiative project called “Ecosystem based Adaptation to Climate change in the high mountainous regions of Central Asia” that is funded by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMU) of Germany and implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan.

Background:
The ecosystems in high mountainous regions of Central Asia are characterized by a unique diversity of flora and fauna. In addition, they are the foundation of the livelihoods of the local population. Specific benefits include clean water, pasture, forest products, protection against floods and landslides, maintenance of soil fertility, and ecotourism. However, the consequences of climate change such as melting glaciers, changing river runoff regimes, and weather anomalies including sharp temperature fluctuations and non-typical precipitation result in negative impacts on these ecosystems. Coupled with unwise land use, these events damage fragile mountain ecosystems and reduce their regeneration ability undermining the local population’s livelihoods. Therefore, people living in rural areas and directly depending on natural resources must adapt to adverse impacts of climate change. This can be done through a set of measures, known in the world practice as ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) approach. It promotes the sustainable use of natural resources to sustain and enhance the livelihood of the population depending on those resources.

Goal:
In two selected pilot regions of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, planned measures will concentrate on climate-informed management of ecosystems in order to maintain their services for the rural population. EbA always starts with identifying the vulnerability of the local population. Besides analyzing the socio-economic situation of the local population, this includes (1) assessing the ecological conditions of the ecosystems in the watershed and the related ecosystem services people benefit from, (2) identifying potential disaster risks, and (3) analyzing glacier dynamics with its response to water runoff. As a baseline to achieve this and to get spatially explicit, remote sensing based techniques and mapping activities need to be utilized.

A first UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) mission has taken place in the Darjomj watershed of the Bartang valley in July 2016. RGB-NIR images as well as a high-resolution Digital Surface Model have been produced that now need to be segmented and analysed in order to produce comprehensive information. The main processing that will take advantage of LAStools is the generation of a DTM from the DSM that will then be used for identifying risk areas (flood zones, landslides and avalanches, etc.). The results of this approach will ultimately be compared with lower-cost satellite images (RapidEye, Planet, Sentinel).

Data:
+ High-resolution RGB and NIR image (10 cm) from a SenseFly Ebee
+ High-resolution DSM (10 cm) from a SenseFly Ebee

LAStools processing:
1) classify DSM points obtained via dense-matching photogrammetry into a SenseFly Ebee imagery into ground and non-ground points via processing pipelines as described here and here [lastile, lassort, lasnoise, lasground]
2) create a DTM [las2dem, lasgrid, blast2dem]
3) produce 3D visualisations to facilitate the communication around adaptation to climate change [lasview]

Alen Berta (recipient of three LASmoons)
Department of Terrestrial Ecosystems and Landscape, Faculty of Forestry
University of Zagreb and Oikon Ltd Institute for Applied Ecology, CROATIA

Background:
After becoming the EU member state, Croatia is obliged to fulfill the obligation risen from the Kyoto protocol: National Inventory Report (NIR) of the Green House Gasses according to UNFCCC. One of the most important things during the creation of the NIR is to know how many forested areas there are and their wood stock and increment. This is needed to calculate the size of the existing carbon pool and its potential for sequestration. Since in Croatia, according to legislative, it is not mandatory to calculate the wood stock and yield of the degraded forest areas (shrubbery and thickets) during the creation of the usual forest management plans, this data is missing. So far, only a rough approximation of the wood stock and increment is used during the creation of NIR. However, these areas are expanding every year due to depopulation of the rural areas and the cessation of traditional farming.

very diverse stand structure of degraded forest areas (shrubbery and thickets)

Goal:
This study will focus on two things: (1) Developing regression models for biomass volume estimation in continental shrubberies and thickets based on airborne LiDAR data. To correlate LiDAR data with biomass volume, over 70 field plots with a radius of 12 meters have been established in more than 550 ha of the hilly and lowland shrubberies in Central Croatia and all trees and shrubberies above 1 cm Diameter at Breast Height (DBH) were recorded with information about tree species, DBH and height. Precise locations of the field plots are measured with survey GNNS and biomass is calculated with parameters from literature. For regression modeling, various statistics from the point clouds matching the field plots will be used (i.e. height percentiles, standard deviation, skewness, kurtosis, …). 2) Testing the developed models for different laser pulse densities to find out if there is a significant deviation from results if the LiDAR point cloud is thinner. This will be helpful for planning of the later scanning for the change detection (increment or degradation).

Data:
+ 641 square km of discrete returns LiDAR data around the City of Zagreb, the capitol of Croatia (but since it is highly populated area, only the outskirts of the area will be used)
+ raw geo-referenced LAS files with up to 3 returns and an average last return point density of 1 pts/m².

LAStools processing:
1) extract area of interest [lasclip or las2las]
2) create differently dense versions (for goal no. 2) [lasthin]
3) remove isolated noise points [lasnoise]
4) classify point clouds into ground and non-ground [lasground]
5) create a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) [las2dem]
6) compute height of points above the ground [lasheight]
7) classify point clouds into vegetation and other [lasclassify]
8) normalize height of the vegetation points [lasheight]
9) extract the areas of the field plots [lasclip]
10) compute various metrics for each plot [lascanopy]
11) convert LAZ to TXT for regression modeling in R [las2txt]

UPDATE: (January 6th): Our new tutorial “downloading Bonn in LiDAR“.
UPDATE: (January 9th): Now a second state went open LiDAR as well. 

Kudos to OpenNRW for offering online download links for hundreds of Gigabytes of open LiDAR for the entire state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westfalen) as announced a few months ago:

• download raw LiDAR points describing the DTM (DGM)
• download raw LiDAR points describing the DSM (DOM)

More and more countries, states, and municipalities are deciding to make their LiDAR archives accessible to the general public. Some are doing entirely for free with instant online download and a generous open license that allows data sharing and commercial use. Others still charge a “small administrative fee” and require filling our actual paperwork with real signatures in ink and postal mailing of hard drives that can easily take half a year to complete. Some licences are also stricter in terms of data sharing and commercial use.

And then there was Germany where all the LiDAR data has traditionally been locked up in some cave by the 16 state survey departments and was sold for more than just a fee. Financial reasons would usually prohibit residents in Germany from making, for example, an elevation profile for their favorite mountain bike trail for hobby purposes. Or starting a small side business that (for 5 Euro a sheet) sells “Gassi Maps” with elevation-optimized dog walking paths of low incline that go past suitable potty spots and dog-friendly coffee shops.

The reason that many national and state mapping agencies have opened their LiDAR holdings for free and unencumbered access are manifold. A previous blog post had looked at the situation in England whose Environment Agency also used to sell LiDAR data and derivatives. The common argument that government agencies have been using to justify selling data (paid for with taxes) to those very same tax payers was that this would be used to finance future surveys.

It was the “freedom of information” request by Louise Huby on November 21st, 2014 that exposed this as a flawed argument. The total amount of revenue generated for all LiDAR and derivatives sales by the Environment Agency was just around £323,000 per year between 2007 and 2014. This figure was dwarfed by its annual operational budget of £1,025,000,000 in 2007/08. The revenue from LiDAR sales was merely 0.03 percent of the agencies’s budget. That can maybe pay for free coffee and tea in the office, but not for future airborne LiDAR flights. The reaction was swift. In September 2015 the Environment Agency made all their DTM and DSM rasters down to 0.25 meter resolution available online for open access and in March 2016 added the raw point clouds for download in LAZ format with a very permissible license. It has since been an incredible success story and the Environment Agency has been propelled into the role of a “champion for open data” as sketched in my ACRS 2016 keynote talk that is available on video here.

Frustrated with the situation in Germany and inspired by the change in geospatial data policy in England, we have been putting in similar “Frag den Staat” freedom of information requests with 11 of the 16 German state mapping agencies, asking about how much sales revenue was generated annually from their LiDAR and derivative sales. These four states denied the request:

• Bavaria (Bayern)
• Hesse (Hessen)
• Saxony (Sachsen)
• Baden-Württemberg (Baden-Württemberg)

We never heard back from Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) and Thuringia (Thüringen) wanted more fees than we were willing to spend on this, but our information requests were answered by five states that are here listed with the average amount of reported revenue per year in EUR:

• Rhineland-Palatinate (Rheinland-Pfalz), 58,012 / year (2005 – 2015)
• Saxony-Anhalt (Sachsen-Anhalt), 132,350 / year (2011 – 2015)
• Saarland (Saarland), 4,448 / year (2008 – 11/2015)
• Schleswig-Holstein (Schleswig-Holstein), 18,458 / year (2012 – 2014)
• State of Bremen (Land Bremen), 597 / year (10/2012 – 09/2015)

LiDAR acquisitions are expensive and while it would be interesting to also find out how much each state has actually spent on airborne surveys over the past years (another “Frag den Staat” request anyone?), it is obvious that the reported revenues are just a tiny fraction of those costs. Exact details of the reported revenue per year can be accessed via the links to the information requests above. The cost table of each answer letter is copied below.

However, it’s not all bad news in Germany. Some of you may have seen my happy announcement of the OpenNRW initiative that come January 2017 this would also include the raw LiDAR points. And did it happen? Yes it did! Although the raw LiDAR points are maybe a little tricky to find, they are available for free download and they come with a very permissible license.

The license is called “Datenlizenz Deutschland – Namensnennung – Version 2.0” or “dl-de/by-2-0” and allows data and derivative sharing as well as commercial use. It merely requires you to properly name the source. For the LiDAR you need to list the “Land NRW (2017)” with the year of the download in brackets as the source and specify the data set that was used via the respective Universal Resource Identification (URI) for the DOM and/or the DGM.

The OpenNRW portal now also offers the download of the LiDAR “punktwolke” (German for point cloud).

Follow this link to get to the open data download portal. Now type in “punktwolke” (German for “point cloud”) into the search field and on this January 3rd 2017 that gives me 2 “Ergebnisse” (German for “results”). The LiDAR point cloud representation is a bit unusual by international standards. One link is for the DGM (German for DTM) and the other for the DOM (German for DSM). Both links are eventually leading you to unstructured LiDAR point clouds that are describing these surfaces. But it’s still a little tricky to find them. First click on the “ATOM” links that get you to XML description with meta information and a lot of links for the DTM and the DSM. Somewhere hidden in there you find the actual download links for hundreds of Gigabytes of LiDAR for the entire state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westfalen):

• download raw LiDAR points describing the DTM (DGM)
• download raw LiDAR points describing the DSM (DOM)

We download the two smallest zipped files DGM and DOM for the municipality of Wickede (Ruhr) to have a look at the data. The point cloud is in EPSG 5555 which is a compound datum of horizontal EPSG 25832 aka ETRS89 / UTM zone 32N and vertical EPSG 5783 aka the “Deutches Haupthohennetz 1992”.

The contents of the DGM zip file contains multiple files per tile.

The DGM zip file has a total of 212 *.xyz files that list the x, y, and z coordinate for each point in ASCII format. We first compress them and add the EPSG 25832 code with laszip. The compressed LAZ files are less than half the size of the zipped XYZ files. Each file corresponds to a particular square kilometer. The name of each tile contains the lower left coordinate of this square kilometer but there can be multiple files for each square kilometer:

• 14 files with “ab” in the name contain very few points. They look like additional points for under bridges. The “b” is likely for “Brücke” (German for “bridge”).
• 38 files with “ag” in the name contain seem to contain only points in areas where buildings used to cover the terrain but with ground elevation. The “g” is likely for “Gebäude” (German for “building”).
• 30 files with “aw” in the name contain seem to contain only points in areas where there are water bodies but with ground elevation. The “w” is likely for “Wasser” (German for “water”).
• 14 files with “brk” in the name also contain few points. They look like the original bridge point that are replaced by the points in the files with “ab” in the name to flatten the bridges. The “brk” is also likely for “Brücke” (German for “bridge”).
• 42 files with “lpb” in the name. They look like the last return LiDAR points that were classified as ground. The “lpb” is likely for “Letzter Pulse Boden” (German for “last return ground”).
• 42 files with “lpnb” in the name. They look like those last return LiDAR points that were classified as non-ground. The “lpnb” is likely for “Letzter Pulse Nicht Boden” (German for “last return not ground”).
• 32 files with “lpub” in the name contain very few points. They look like the last return points that are too low and were therefore excluded. The “lpub” is likely for “Letzter Pulse Unter Boden” (German for “last return under ground”).

It is left to an exercise to the user for figure out which of those above sets of files should be used for generating a raster DTM. (-: Give us your ideas in the comments. The DOM zip file has a total of 72 *.xyz files. We also compress them and add the EPSG 25832 code with laszip. The compressed LAZ files are less than half the size of the zipped XYZ files. Again there are multiple files for each square kilometer:

• 30 files with “aw” in the name contain seem to contain only points in areas where there are water bodies but with ground elevation. The “w” is likely for “Wasser” (German for “water”).
• 42 files with “fp” in the name. They look like the first return LiDAR points. The “fp” is likely for “Frühester Pulse” (German for “first return”).

If you use all these points from the DOM folder your get the nice DSM shown below … albeit not a spike-free one.

A triangulated first return DSM generated mainly from the file “dom1l-fp_32421_5705_1_nw.laz” with the points from “dom1l-aw_32421_5705_1_nw.laz” for areas with water bodies shown in yellow.

Kudos to OpenNRW for being the first German state to open their LiDAR holdings. Which one of the other 15 German state survey departments will be next to promote their LiDAR as open data. If you are not the last one to do so you can expect to get featured here too … (-;

UPDATE (January 5th): The folks at OpenNRW just tweeted us information about the organization of the zipped archives in the DTM (DGM) and DSM (DOM) folders. We guessed pretty okay which points are in which file but the graphic below (also available here) summarizes it much more nicely and also tells us that “a” was for “ausgefüllt” (German for “filled up”). Maximally two returns per pulse are available: either a single return or a first return plus a last return. There are no intermediate returns, which may be an issue for those interested in vegetation mapping.

Nice illustration of which LiDAR point is in which file. All files with ‘ab’, ‘ag’, or ‘aw’ in the name contain synthetic points that fill up ground areas not properly reached by the laser.

This is the first part of a series on how to process the newly released open LiDAR data for the entire state of North Rhine-Westphalia that was announced a few days ago. Again, kudos to OpenNRW for being the most progressive open data state in Germany. You can follow this tutorial after downloading the latest version of LAStools as well as a pair of DGM and DOM files for your area of interest from these two download pages.

• download raw LiDAR points describing the DTM (DGM)
• download raw LiDAR points describing the DSM (DOM)

We have downloaded the pair of DGM and DOM files for the Federal City of Bonn. Bonn is the former capital of Germany and was host to the FOSS4G 2016 conference. As both files are larger than 10 GB, we use the wget command line tool with option ‘-c’ that will restart where it left off in case the transmission gets interrupted.

The DGM file and the DOM file are zipped archives that contain the points in 1km by 1km tiles stored as x, y, z coordinates in ETRS89 / UTM 32 projection as simple ASCII text with centimeter resolution (i.e. two decimal digits).

>> more dgm1l-lpb_32360_5613_1_nw.xyz
360000.00 5613026.69 164.35
360000.00 5613057.67 164.20
360000.00 5613097.19 164.22
360000.00 5613117.89 164.08
360000.00 5613145.35 164.03
[...]

There is more than one tile for each square kilometer as the LiDAR points have been split into different files based on their classification and their return type. Furthermore there are also synthetic points that were used by the land survey department to replace certain LiDAR points in order to generate higher quality DTM and DSM raster products.

The zipped DGM archive is 10.5 GB in size and contains 956 *.xyz files totaling 43.5 GB after decompression. The zipped DOM archive is 11.5 GB in size and contains 244 *.xyz files totaling 47.8 GB. Repeatedly loading these 90 GB of text data and parsing these human-readable x, y, and z coordinates is inefficient with common LiDAR software. In the first step we convert the textual *.xyz files into binary *.laz files that can be stored, read and copied more efficiently. We do this with the open source LASzip compressor that is distributed with LAStools using these two command line calls:

laszip -i dgm1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\*.xyz ^
       -epsg 25832 -vertical_dhhn92 ^
       -olaz ^
       -cores 2

laszip -i dom1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\*.xyz ^
       -epsg 25832 -vertical_dhhn92 ^
       -olaz ^
       -cores 2

The point coordinates are is in EPSG 5555, which is a compound datum of horizontal EPSG 25832 aka ETRS89 / UTM zone 32N and vertical EPSG 5783 aka the “Deutsches Haupthoehennetz 1992” or DHHN92. We add this information to each *.laz file during the LASzip compression process with the command line options ‘-epsg 25832’ and ‘-vertical_dhhn92’.

LASzip reduces the file size by a factor of 10. The 956 *.laz DGM files compress down to 4.3 GB from 43.5 GB for the original *.xyz files and the 244 *.laz DOM files compress down to 4.8 GB from 47.8 GB. From here on out we continue to work with the 9 GB of slim *.laz files. But before we delete the 90 GB of bulky *.xyz files we make sure that there are no file corruptions (e.g. disk full, truncated files, interrupted processes, bit flips, …) in the *.laz files.

laszip -i dgm1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\*.laz -check

laszip -i dom1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\*.laz -check

One advantage of having the LiDAR in an industry standard such as the LAS format (or its lossless compressed twin, the LAZ format) is that the header of the file stores the number of points per file, the bounding box, as well as the projection information that we have added. This allows us to very quickly load an overview for example, into lasview.

lasview -i dgm1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\*.laz -GUI

The bounding boxes of the DGM files quickly give us an overview in the GUI when the files are in LAS or LAZ format.

Now we want to find a particular site in Bonn such as the World Conference Center Bonn where FOSS4G 2016 was held. Which tile is it in? We need some geospatial context to find it, for example, by creating an overview in form of KML files that we can load into Google Earth. We use the files from the DOM folder with “fp” in the name as points on buildings are mostly “first returns”. See what our previous blog post writes about the different file names if you can not wait for the second part of this series. We can create the KML files with lasboundary either via the GUI or in the command line.

lasboundary -i dom1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\dom1l-fp*.laz ^
            -gui

Only the “fp” tiles from the DOM folder loaded the GUI into lasboundary.

lasboundary -i dom1l_05314000_Bonn_EPSG5555_XYZ\dom1l-fp*.laz ^
            -use_bb -labels -okml

We zoom in and find the World Conference Center Bonn and load the identified tile into lasview. Well, we did not expect this to happen, but what we see below will make this series of tutorials even more worthwhile. There is a lot of “high noise” in the particular tile we picked. We should have noticed the unusually high z range of 406.42 meters in the Google Earth pop-up. Is this high electromagnetic radiation interfering with the sensors? There are a number of high-tech government buildings with all kind of antennas nearby (such as the United Nations Bonn Campus the mouse cursor points at).

Significant amounts of high noise are in the first returns of the DOM tile we picked.

But the intended area of interest was found. You can see the iconic “triangulated” roof of the building that is across from the World Conference Center Bonn.

The World Conference Center Bonn is across from the building with the “triangulated” roof.

Please don’t think it is the responsibility of OpenNRW to remove the noise and provide cleaner data. The land survey has already processed this data into whatever products they needed and that is where their job ended. Any additional services – other than sharing the raw data – are not in their job description. We’ll take care of that … (-:

Acknowledgement: The LiDAR data of OpenNRW comes with a very permissible license. It is called “Datenlizenz Deutschland – Namensnennung – Version 2.0” or “dl-de/by-2-0” and allows data and derivative sharing as well as commercial use. It only requires us to name the source. We need to cite the “Land NRW (2017)” with the year of the download in brackets and specify the Universal Resource Identification (URI) for both the DOM and the DGM. Done. So easy. Thank you, OpenNRW … (-:

Rachel Opitz (recipient of three LASmoons)
Center for Virtualization and Applied Spatial Technologies
Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, USA

Background:
In Spring 2017 Rachel Opitz will be teaching a course on Remote Sensing for Human Ecology and Archaeology at the University of South Florida. The aim of the course is to provide students with the practical skills and knowledge needed to work with contemporary remote sensing data. The course focuses on airborne laser scanning and hyper-spectral data and their application in Human Ecology and Archaeology. Through the course students will be introduced to a number of software packages commonly used to process and interpret these data, with an emphasis on free and/or open source tools.

Classification parameters and the resolution at which the DTM is interpolated both have a significant impact on our ability to recognize anthropogenic features in the landscape. Here we see a small quarry. More aggressive filtering and a coarser DTM resolution (left) makes it difficult to recognize that this is a quarry. Less aggressive filtering and a higher resolution (right) leaves some vegetation behind, but makes the edges of the quarry and some in-situ blocks clearly visible.

Goal:
The students will develop practical skills in applied remote sensing through hands-on exercises. Learning to assess, manage and process large data sets is essential. In particular, the students in the course will learn to:
+ Identify the set of techniques needed to solve a problem in applied remote sensing
+ Find public imagery and specify acquisitions
+ Assess data quality
+ Process airborne LiDAR data
+ Combine complementary remote sensing data sources
+ Create effective data visualizations
+ Analyze digital topographic and spectral data to answer questions in human ecology and archaeology

Data:
The course will include case studies that draw on a variety of publicly available data sets that will all be used in the exercises:
+ the PNOA data from Spain
+ data held by NOAA
+ data collected using NASA’s GLiHT platform

LAStools processing:
LAStools will be used throughout the course, as students learn to assess the quality of LiDAR data, classify raw LiDAR point clouds, create raster terrain and canopy models, and produce visualizations. The online tutorials and videos available via the company website and the over 50 hours of video on YouTube as well as the LAStools user forum will be used as resources during the course.

The floodgates of open geospatial data have opened in Germany. Days after reporting about the first state-wide release of open LiDAR, we are happy to follow up with a second wonderful open data story. The state of Thuringia (Thüringen) – also called the “green heart of Germany” – has also implemented an open geospatial data policy. This had already been announced in March 2016 but must have gone online just now. A reader of our last blog article pointed this out in the comments. And it’s not just LiDAR. You can download:

• raster DTM (DGM) and DOM (DSM) and LiDAR points
• aerial images and orthophotos
• topographical maps (as GeoTIFFs or in layers)
• various land cover models
• shapefiles of all cadastral districts
• 3D buildings (LOD1 / LOD2) as CityGML
• building coordinates
• building footprints

It all comes with the same permissible license as OpenNRW’s data. This is open data madness! Everything you could possibly hope for presented via a very functional download portal. Kudos to TLVermGeo (“Thüringisches Landesamt für Vermessung und Geoinformation”) for creating an open treasure cove of free-for-all geospatial data.

Let us have a look at the LiDAR. We use the interactive portal to zoom to an area of interest. With the recent rise of demagogues it cannot hurt to look at a stark reminder of where such demagoguery can lead. In his 1941 play “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” – a satirical allegory on the rise of Adolf Hitler – Bertolt Brecht writes “… don’t rejoice too soon at your escape. The womb he crawled from is still going strong.”

We are downloading LiDAR data around the Buchenwald concentration camp. According to Wikipedia, it was established in July 1937 and was one of the largest on German soil. Today the remains of Buchenwald serve as a memorial and as a permanent exhibition and museum.

We download the 15 tiles surrounding the blue one: two on its left, two on its right and one corresponding row of five tiles above and below. Each of the 15 zipped archives contains a *.laz file and *.meta file. The *.laz file contains the LiDAR points and *.meta file contains the textual information below where “Lage” and “Höhe” refer to “horizontal” and “vertical”:

Datei: las_655_5653_1_th_2010-2013.laz
Erfassungsdatum: 2011-03
Erfassungsmethode: Airborne Laserscanning
Lasergebiet: Laser_04_2010
EPSG-Code Lage: 25832
EPSG-Code Höhe: 5783
Quasigeoid: GCG2005
Genauigkeit Lage: 0.12m
Genauigkeit Höhe: 0.04m
Urheber: (c) GDI-Th, Freistaat Thueringen, TLVermGeo

Next we will run a few quality checks on the 15 tiles by processing them with lasinfo, lasoverlap, lasgrid, and las2dem. We output all results into a folder named ‘quality’.

With lasinfo we create one text file per tile that summarizes its contents. The ‘-cd’ option computes the all return and last return density. The ‘-histo point_source 1’ option produces a histogram of point source IDs that are supposed to store which flight line each return came from. The ‘-odir’ and ‘-odix’ options specify the directory for the output and an appendix to the output file name. The ‘-cores 4’ option starts 4 processes in parallel, each working on a different tile.

lasinfo  -i las_*2010-2013.laz ^
         -cd ^
         -histo point_source 1 ^
         -odir quality -odix _info -otxt ^
         -cores 4

If you scrutinize the resulting text files you will find that the average last return density ranges from 6.29 to 8.13 and that the point source IDs 1 and 9999 seem to encode some special points. Likely those are synthetic points added to improve the derived rasters similar to the “ab”, “ag”, and “aw” files in the OpenNRW LiDAR. Odd is the lack of intermediate returns despite return numbers ranging all the way up to 7. Looks like only the first returns and the last returns are made available (like for the OpenNRW LiDAR). That will make those a bit sad who were planning to use this LiDAR for forest or vegetation mapping. The header of the *.laz files does not store geo-referencing information, so we will have to enter that manually. And the classification codes do not follow the standard ASPRS assignment. In red is our (currently) best guess what these classification codes mean:

[...]
histogram of classification of points:
 887223 ground (2) ground
 305319 wire guard (13) building
 172 tower (15) bridges
 41 wire connector (16) synthetic ground under bridges
 12286 bridge deck (17) synthetic ground under building
 166 Reserved for ... (18) synthetic ground building edge
 5642801 Reserved for ... (20) non-ground
[...]

With lasoverlap we can visualize how much overlap the flight lines have and the (potential miss-)alignment between them. We drop the synthetic points with point source IDs 1 and 9999 and add geo-referencing information with ‘-epsg 25832’ so that the resulting images can be displayed as Google Earth overlays. The options ‘-min_diff 0.1’ and ‘-max_diff 0.4’ map elevation differences of up +/- 10 cm to white. Above +/- 10 cm the color becomes increasingly red/blue with full saturation at +/- 40 cm or higher. This difference can only be computed for pixels with two or more overlapping flight lines.

lasoverlap  -i las_*2010-2013.laz ^
            -drop_point_source 1 ^
            -drop_point_source 9999 ^
            -min_diff 0.1 -max_diff 0.4 ^
            -odir quality -opng ^
            -epsg 25832 ^
            -cores 4

With lasgrid we check the density distribution of the laser pulses by computing the point density of the last returns for each 2 by 2 meter pixel and then mapping the computed density value to a false color that is blue for a density of 0 and red for a density of 10 or higher.

lasgrid  -i las_*2010-2013.laz ^
         -drop_point_source 1 ^
         -drop_point_source 9999 ^
         -keep_last ^
         -step 2 -point_density ^
         -false -set_min_max 0 10 ^
         -odir quality -odix _d_0_10 -opng ^
         -epsg 25832 ^
         -cores 4

Pulse density variation due to flight line overlap is expected. But also the contribution of flight turbulence is quite significant.

With las2dem we can check the quality of the already existing ground classification in the LiDAR by producing a hillshaded image of a DTM for visual inspection. Based on our initial guess on the classification codes (see above) we keep those synthetic points that improve the DTM (classification codes 16, 17, and 18) in addition to the ground points (classification code 2).

las2dem  -i las_*2010-2013.laz ^
         -keep_class 2 16 17 18 ^
         -step 1 ^
         -hillshade ^
         -odir quality -odix _shaded_dtm -opng ^
         -epsg 25832 ^
         -cores 4

Problems in the ground classification of LiDAR points are often visible in a hillshaded DTM.

Wow. We see a number of ground disturbances in the resulting hillshaded DTM. Some of them are expected because if you read up on the history of the Buchenwald concentration camp you will learn that in 1950 large parts of the camp were demolished. However, the laser finds the remnants of those barracks and buildings as clearly visible ground disturbances under the canopy of the dense forest that has grown there since. And then there are also these bumps that look like bomb craters. Are those from the American bombing raid on August 24, 1944?

We are still not entirely sure what those “bumps” arem but our initially assumption that all of those would have to be bomb craters from that fatal American bombing raid on August 24, 1944 seems to be wrong. Below is a close-up with lasview of the triangulated and shaded ground points from the lower right corner of tile ‘las_656_5654_1_th_2010-2013.laz’.

Close-up in lasview on the bumbs in the ground.

We are not sure if all the bumps we can see here are there for the same reason. But we found an old map and managed to overlay it on Google Earth. It suggest that at least the bigger bumps are not bomb craters. On the map they are labelled as “Erdfälle” which is German for “sink hole”.

We got a reminder on the danger of demagogues as well as a glimpse into conflict archaeology and geomorphology with this open LiDAR download and processing exercise. If you want to explore this area any further you can either download the LiDAR and download LAStools and process the data yourself or simply get our KML files here.

Acknowledgement: The LiDAR data of TLVermGeo comes with a very permissible license. It is called “Datenlizenz Deutschland – Namensnennung – Version 2.0” or “dl-de/by-2-0” and allows data and derivative sharing as well as commercial use. It only requires us to name the source. We need to cite the “geoportal-th.de (2017)” with the year of the download in brackets and should specify the Universal Resource Identification (URI). We have not found this yet and use this URL as a placeholder until we know the correct one. Done. So easy. Thank you, geoportal Thüringen … (-:

The majority of LAStools users are processing airborne LiDAR. That should not surprise as airborne is by far the most common form of LiDAR in terms of square kilometers covered. The availability of LiDAR as “open data” is also pretty much restricted to airborne surveys, which are often tax-payer funded and then distributed freely to achieve maximum return of investment.

But folks are increasingly using our software to do some of the “heavy lifting” for mobile LiDAR, either mounted on a truck for scanning cities or on a train for capturing railroad infrastructure. The LiDAR collected for the cities of Budapest and Singapore, for example, was pre-processed by multi-core scripted LAStools when the scanning trucks returned with their daily trajectories worth of point clouds captured by a RIEGL VMX-450 mobile mapping system.

One customer who was recently scanning railroad infrastructure wanted to do automatic ground classification as a first step prior to further segmentation of the data. We were asked for advice because on such data the standard settings of lasground left too many patches of ground unclassified. Also the uniform tiling lastile generates by default is not a good way to break such data into manageable pieces given the drastically varying point densities in mobile scanning.

We obtained a 217 MB file in LAZ format with 40 million points corresponding to a 2.7 km stretch of railway track. We first run a quick lasindex (with the options for ‘mobile’) on the file that creates a spatial indexing LAX file with maximally 10 meter resolution. This not only allows faster area-of-interest queries but also gives us a more detailed preview than just the bounding box of where the LiDAR points actually are in the GUI of LAStools.

Presence of LAX files results in actual extend of LiDAR being shown in GUI.

lasindex -i segment.laz -tile_size 10 -maximum -100

We then run lastile four times to create an adaptive tiling in which no tile has more than 6 million points. The first call creates the initial 1000 by 1000 meter tiles. The following three calls refine all those tiles that still have more than 6 million points first into 500 by 500 meter, then 250 by 250 meter, and finally 125 by 125 meter tiles in parallel on 4 cores. Note the ‘-refine_tiling’ option is used in the first call to lastile and the ‘-refine_tiles’ option in all subsequent calls.

lastile -i segment.laz ^
        -tile_size 1000 ^
        -buffer 10 -flag_as_withheld ^
        -refine_tiling 6000000 ^
        -odir tiles_raw -o rail.laz
lastile -i tiles_raw\*_1000.laz ^
        -flag_as_withheld ^
        -refine_tiles 6000000 ^
        -olaz ^
        -cores 4
lastile -i tiles_raw\*_500.laz ^
        -flag_as_withheld ^
        -refine_tiles 6000000 ^
        -olaz ^
        -cores 4
lastile -i tiles_raw\*_250.laz ^
        -flag_as_withheld ^
        -refine_tiles 6000000 ^
        -olaz ^
        -cores 4

The resulting tiles all have fewer than 6 million points but still have the initial 10 meter buffer that was specified by the first call to lastile. Two tiles were sufficiently small after the 1st call, three tiles after the 2nd call, eleven tiles after 3rd call, and three tiles after the 4th.

points of adaptive tile (high-lighted in blue below) colored by intensity

Adaptive tiling created with four calls to lastile. Scale factors of 0.00025 (see mouse cursor) implies that point coordinates are stored with quarter millimeter resolution. Lowering them to 0.001 would result in better compression and lower I/O.

Noise in the data – especially low noise – can lead lasground into choosing the wrong points during ground classification by latching on to those low noise points. We first classify the noise points into a different class (7) using lasnoise so we can later ignore them. These particular settings were found by experimenting on a few tiles with different values (see the README file) until visual inspection showed that most low points had been classified as noise.

lasnoise -i tiles_raw\*.laz ^
         -step_xy 0.5 -step_z 0.1 ^
         -odir tiles_denoised -olaz ^
         -cores 4

noise points shown in violett

The points classified as noise will not be considered as ground points during the next step. For this it matters little that lamp posts, wires, or vegetation are wrongly marked as noise now. We can always undo their noise classification once the ground points were classified. Important is that those pointed to by the mouse cursor, which are below the desired ground, are excluded from consideration during the ground classification step. Here those low points are not actually noise but returns generated wherever the laser was able to “peek” through an opening to a lower surface.

lasground -i tiles_denoised\*.laz ^
          -ignore_class 7 ^
          -step 1 -sub 3 -bulge 0.1 -spike 0.1 -offset 0.02 ^
          -odir tiles_ground -olaz ^
          -cores 4

For classification with lasground there are a number of options to play with  (see the README file) but the most important is the correct step size. It is terrain along the railway track bed that is supposed to get represented well. The usual step of 5 to 40 meter for lasground aim at the removal of vegetation and man-made structures from airborne LiDAR. They are not the right choice here. A step of 1 and the parameters shown above gives us the ground shown below.

Classification of terrain along railway track bed using lasground with ‘-step 1’

The new ‘-flag_as_withheld’ option in lastile that flags each point in the buffer with the withheld flag is useful in case we want to remove all buffer points on-the-fly, for example, in order to create a DTM hillshade of 25 cm resolution for a visual quality check of the entire 2.7 km track using blast2dem from the BLAST extension of LAStools.

blast2dem -i tiles_ground\*.laz -merged ^
          -drop_withheld -keep_class 2 ^
          -hillshade -step 0.25 ^
          -o dtm_hillshaded.png

Small 600 x 600 pixel detail of hill-shaded 5663 x 9619 pixel DTM raster generated by blast2dem.

Jesús García Sánchez (recipient of three LASmoons)
Landscapes of Early Roman Colonization (LERC) project
Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, The Netherlands

Background:
Our project Landscapes of Early Roman Colonization (LERC) has been studying the hinterland of the Latin colony of Aesernia (Molise region, Italy) using several non-destructive techniques, chiefly artefactual survey, geophysics, and interpretation of aerial photographs. Nevertheless large areas of the territory are covered by the dense forests of the Matese mountains, a ridge belonging the Apennine chain, or covered by bushes due to the abandonment of the countryside. The project won’t be complete without integrating the marginal, remote and forested areas into our study of the Roman hinterland. Besides, it’s also relevant to discuss the feasibility of LiDAR data sets in the study of Mediterranean landscapes and its role within contemporary Landscape Archaeology.

LiDAR coverage in Molise region, Italy.

Goal:
+ to study in detail forested areas in the colonial hinterland of Aesernia.
+ to found the correct parameters of the classification algorithm to be able to locate possible archaeological structures or to document appropriately those we already known.
+ to document and create new visualization of hill-top fortified sites that belong to the indigenous population and are currently poorly studied due to inaccessibility and forest coverage (Monte San Paolo, Civitalla, Castelriporso, etc.)
+ to demonstrate the archaeological potential of LiDAR data in Italy and help other scholars to work with that kind of data, explaining basic information about data quality, where and how to acquire imagery and examples of application in archaeology. A paper entitled “Working with ALS – LiDAR data in Central South Italy. Tips and experiences”, will be presented in the International Mediterranean Survey Workshop by the end of February in Athens.

Civitella hillfort (Longano, IS) and its local context: ridges and forest belonging to the Materse mountains and the Appenines.

Data:
Recently the LERC project has acquired a large LiDAR dataset created by the Italian Geoportale Nazionale and the Minisstero dell’Ambiente e della Tutella del Territorio e del Mare. The data was produced originally to monitor land-slides and erosive risk.
+ The average point resolution is 1 meter.
+ The data sets were cropped originally in 1 sq km. tiles by the Geoportale Nazionale for distribution purposes.

LAStools processing:
1) data is provided in *.txt files thus the first step is to create appropriate LAS files to work with [txt2las]
2) combine areas of circa 16 sq km (still fewer than 20 million points to be processed in one piece with LAStools) in the surroundings of the colony of Aesernia and in the Matese mountains [lasmerge]
3) assign the correct projection to the data [lasmerge or las2las]
4) extract the care-earth with the best-fitting parameters [lasground or lasground_new]
5) create bare-earth terrain rasters as a first step to visualize and analyze the area [lasdem]

PRESS RELEASE (for immediate release)
February 13, 2017
rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany

Just in time for ILMF 2017 in Denver, the makers of the popular LiDAR processing software LAStools announce that the prototype for the “native LAS 1.4 extension” of their award-winning open source LASzip LiDAR compressor is ready for testing. An update to the compressed LAZ format had become necessary due to a core change in the ASPRS LAS 1.4 specification which had introduced several new point types.

A new feature of the updated LASzip compressor is the ability to selectively decompress of only those attributes of each point that really are needed by the application that is reading the LAZ file. Minimally this will be the x and y coordinate of each point and the return counts, which are sufficient to – for example – calculate the exact extend of the survey area. Most applications will also want to access z coordinate. However, the intensities, the GPS times, the RGB or NIR colors, and the new “Extra Bytes” are often not needed. As the updated LAZ format compresses these different attributes into separate layers, their decompression can then be skipped. Therefore sometimes only 40% of a compressed LAZ file needs to be decompressed to access the coordinates of points with many attributes.

The percentages of a compressed LAZ file used to encode different point attributes for two example LAS 1.4 files.

The new LASzip prototype is currently being crowd-tested. Interested parties who already have holdings of LAS 1.4 files with point types 6 to 10 may send an email to ‘lasproto@rapidlasso.com’ to participate in these tests.

The release of the new LASzip compressor comes more than a year late as development had been intentionally delayed to give ESRI an opportunity to contribute their needs and ideas to create a joint open format with the community and avoid LiDAR format fragmentation. Sadly, this effort ultimately failed.

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.

Elia Palop-Navarro (recipient of three LASmoons)
Research Unit in Biodiversity (UO-PA-CSIC)
University of Oviedo, SPAIN.

Background:
Old-growth forests play an important role in biodiversity conservation. However, long history of human transformation of the landscape has led to the existence of few such forests nowadays. Its structure, characterized by multiple tree species and ages, old trees and abundant deadwood, is particularly sensible to management practices (Paillet et al. 2015) and requires long time to recover from disturbance (Burrascano et al. 2013). Within protected areas we would expect higher proportions of old-growth forests since these areas are in principle managed to ensure conservation of natural ecosystems and processes. Nevertheless, most protected areas in the EU sustained use and exploitation in the past, or even still do.

Part of the study area. Dotted area corresponds to forest surface under protection.

Goal:
Through the application of a model developed in the study area, using public LiDAR and forest inventory data (Palop-Navarro et al. 2016), we’d like to know how much of the forest in a network of mountain protected areas retains structural attributes compatible with old-growth forests. The LiDAR processing tasks which LAStools will be used for involve a total of 614,808 plots in which we have to derive height metrics, such as mean or median canopy height and its variability.

Vegetation profile colored by height in a LiDAR sample of the study area.

Data:
+ Public LiDAR data that can be downloaded here with mean pulse density 0.5 points per square meter. This data has up to 5 returns and is already classified into ground, low, mid or high vegetation, building, noise or overlapped.
+ The area covers forested areas within protected areas in Cantabrian Mountains, occupying 1,207 km2.

LAStools processing:
1) quality checking of the data as described in several videos and blog posts [lasinfo, lasvalidate, lasoverlap, lasgrid, las2dem]
2) use existing ground classification (if quality suffices) to normalize the elevations of to heights above ground using tile-based processing with on-the-fly buffers of 50 meters to avoid edge artifacts [lasheight]
3) compute height-based forestry metrics (e.g. ‘-avg’, ‘-std’, and ‘-p 50’) for each plot in the study area [lascanopy]

References:
Burrascano, S., Keeton, W.S., Sabatini, F.M., Blasi, C. 2013. Commonality and variability in the structural attributes of moist temperate old-growth forests: a global review. Forest Ecology and Management 291:458-479.
Paillet, Y., Pernot, C., Boulanger, V., Debaive, N., Fuhr, M., Gilg, O., Gosselin, F. 2015. Quantifying the recovery of old-growth attributes in forest reserves: A first reference for France. Forest Ecology and Management 346:51-64.
Palop-Navarro, E., Bañuelos, M.J., Quevedo, M. 2016. Combinando datos lidar e inventario forestal para identificar estados avanzados de desarrollo en bosques caducifolios. Ecosistemas 25(3):35-42.

Chloe Brown (recipient of three LASmoons)
Geosciences, School of Geography
University of Nottingham, UK

Background:
Malaysia’s North Selangor peat swamp forest is experiencing rapid and large scale conversion of peat swampland to oil palm agriculture, contrary to prevailing environmental guidelines. Given the global importance of tropical peat lands, and the uncertainties surrounding historical and future oil palm development, quantifying the spatial distribution of ecosystem service values, such as climate mitigation, is key to understanding the trade-offs associated with anthropogenic land use change.
The study explores the capabilities and methods of remote sensing and field-based data sets for extracting relevant metrics for the assessment of carbon stocks held in North Selangor peat swamp forest reserve, estimating both the current carbon stored in the above and below ground biomass, as well as the changes in carbon stock over time driven by anthropogenic land use change. Project findings will feed directly into peat land management practices and environmental accounting in Malaysia through the Tropical Catchments Research Initiative (TROCARI), and support the Integrated Management Plan of the Selangor State Forest Department (see here for a sample).

Goal:
LiDAR data is now seen as the practical option when assessing canopy height over large scales (Fassnacht et al., 2014), with Lucas et al., (2008) believing LiDAR data to produce more accurate tree height estimates than those derived from manual field based methods. At this stage of the project, the goal is to produce a high quality LiDAR-derived Canopy Height Model (CHM) following the “pit-free” algorithm of Khosravipour et.al., 2014 using the LAStools software.

Data:
+ LiDAR provided by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Airborne Research and Survey Facility’s 2014 Malaysia Campaign.
+ covers 685 square kilometers (closed source)
+ collected with Leica ALS50-II LiDAR system
+ average pulse spacing < 1 meter, average pulse density 1.8 per square meter

LAStools processing:
1) Create 1000 meter tiles with 35 meter buffer to avoid edge artifacts [lastile]
2) Remove noise points (class 7) that are already classified [las2las]
3) Classify point clouds into ground (class 2) and non-ground (class 1) [lasground]
4) Generate normalized above-ground heights [lasheight]
5) Create DSM and DTM [las2dem]
6) Generate a pit-free Canopy Height Model (CHM) as described here [lasthin, las2dem, lasgrid]
7) Generate a spike-free Canopy Height Model (CHM) as described here for comparison [las2dem]

References:
Fassnacht, F.E., Hartig, F., Latifi, H., Berger, C., Hernández, J., Corvalán, and P., Koch, B. (2014). Importance of sample size, data type and prediction method for remote sensing-based estimations of above-ground forest biomass. Remote Sensing. Environment. 154, 102–114.
Khosravipour, A., Skidmore, A. K., Isenburg, M., Wang, T., and Hussin, Y. A. (2014). Generating pit-free canopy height models from airborne LiDAR. Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing, 80(9), 863-872.
Lucas, R. M., Lee, A. C., and Bunting, P. J., (2008). Retrieving forest biomass through integration of casi and lidar data. International Journal of Remote Sensing, 29 (5), 1553-1577.