In the first part of this series we downloaded, compressed, and viewed some of the newly released open LiDAR data for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. In the second part we look at how to merge the multiple point clouds provided back into single LAS or LAZ files that are as proper as possible. Follow along with a recent version of LAStools and a pair of DGM and DOM files for your area of interest. For downloading the LiDAR we suggest using the wget command line tool with option ‘-c’ that after interruption in transmission will restart where it left off.

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

In the first part of this series we downloaded the pair of DGM and DOM files for the City of Bonn. 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 with centimeter resolution. We had already converted these textual *.xyz files into binary *.laz files. We did this with the open source LASzip compressor that is distributed with LAStools as described in that blog post. We continue now with the assumption that you have converted all of the *.xyz files to *.laz files as described here.

The mapping from tile names in DGM and DOM archives to the classification and return type of points: lp = last return. fp = first return, ab,aw,ag = synthetic points

There are multiple tiles for each square kilometer as the LiDAR has been split into different files based on classification and return type. Furthermore there are also synthetic points that were created by the land survey department to replace LiDAR under bridges and along buildings for generating higher quality rasters. We want to combine all points of a square kilometer into a single LAZ tile as it is usually expected. Simply merging the multiple files per tile is not an option as this would result in loosing point classifications and return type information as well as in duplicating all single returns that are stored in more than one file. The folks at OpenNRW offer this helpful graphic to know what the acronyms above mean:

Illustration of how acronyms used in tile names correspond to point classification and type.

In the following we’ll be looking at the set of files corresponding to the UTM tile 32366 / 5622. We wanted an interesting area with large buildings, a bridge, and water. We were looking for a suitable area using the KML overlays generated in part one. The tile along the Rhine river selected in the picture below covers the old city hall, the opera house, and the “Kennedy Bridge” has a complete set of DGM and DOM files:

      3,501 dgm1l-ab_32366_5622_1_nw.laz
     16,061 dgm1l-ag_32366_5622_1_nw.laz
      3,269 dgm1l-aw_32366_5622_1_nw.laz
    497,008 dgm1l-brk_32366_5622_1_nw.laz
  7,667,715 dgm1l-lpb_32366_5622_1_nw.laz
 12,096,856 dgm1l-lpnb_32366_5622_1_nw.laz
     15,856 dgm1l-lpub_32366_5622_1_nw.laz

      3,269 dom1l-aw_32366_5622_1_nw.laz
 21,381,106 dom1l-fp_32366_5622_1_nw.laz

We find the name of the tile that covers the “Kennedy Bridge” using the KML overlays generated in part one.

We now assign classification codes and flags to the returns from the different files using las2las, merge them together with lasmerge, and recover single, first, and last return information with lasduplicate. We set classifications to bridge deck (17), ground (2), to unclassified (1), and to noise (7) for all returns in the files with the acronym ‘brk’ (= bridge points), the acronym ‘lpb’ (= last return ground), the acronym ‘lpnb’ (= last return non-ground), and the acronym ‘lpub’ (= last return under ground). with las2las and store the resulting files to a temporary folder.

las2las -i dgm1l-brk_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
        -set_classification 17 ^
        -odir temp -olaz

las2las -i dgm1l-lpb_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
        -set_classification 2 ^
        -odir temp -olaz

las2las -i dgm1l-lpnb_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
        -set_classification 1 ^
        -odir temp -olaz

las2las -i dgm1l-lpub_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
        -set_classification 7 ^
        -odir temp -olaz

Next we use the synthetic flag of the LAS format specification to flag any additional points that were added (no measured) by the survey department to generate better raster products. We set classifications to ground (2) and the synthetic flag for all points of the files with the acronym ‘ab’ (= additional ground) and the acronym ‘ag’ (= additional building footprint). We set classifications to water (9) and the synthetic flag for all points of the files with the acronym ‘aw’ (= additional water bodies). Files with acronym ‘aw’ appear both in the DGM and DOM archive. Obviously we need to keep only one copy.

las2las -i dgm1l-ab_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
        -set_classification 2 ^
        -set_synthetic_flag 1 ^
        -odir temp -olaz

las2las -i dgm1l-ag_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
        -set_classification 2 ^
        -set_synthetic_flag 1 ^
        -odir temp -olaz

las2las -i dgm1l-aw_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
        -set_classification 9 ^
        -set_synthetic_flag 1 ^
        -odir temp -olaz

Using lasmerge we merge all returns from files with acronyms ‘brk’ (= bridge points), ‘lpb’ (= last return ground),  ‘lpnb’ (= last return non-ground), and ‘lpub’ (= last return under ground) into a single file that will then contain all of the (classified) last returns for this tile.

lasmerge -i temp\dgm1l-brk_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
         -i temp\dgm1l-lpb_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
         -i temp\dgm1l-lpnb_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
         -i temp\dgm1l-lpub_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
         -o temp\dgm1l-lp_32366_5622_1_nw.laz

Next we run lasduplicate three times to recover which points are single returns and which points are the first and the last return of a pair of points generated by the same laser shot. First we run lasduplicate with option ‘-unique_xyz’ to remove any xyz duplicates from the last return file. We also mark all surviving returns as the second of two returns. Similarly, we remove any xyz duplicates from the first return file and mark all survivors as the first of two returns. Finally we run lasduplicate with option ‘-single_returns’ with the unique last and the unique first return files as ‘-merged’ input. If a return with the exact same xyz coordinates appears in both files only the first copy is kept and marked as a single return. In order to keep the flags and classifications from the last return file, the order in which the last and first return files are listed in the command line is important.

lasduplicate -i temp\dgm1l-lp_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
             -set_return_number 2 -set_number_of_returns 2 ^
             -unique_xyz ^
             -o temp\last_32366_5622_1_nw.laz

lasduplicate -i dom1l-fp_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
             -set_return_number 1 -set_number_of_returns 2 ^
             -unique_xyz ^
             -o temp\first_32366_5622_1_nw.laz

lasduplicate -i temp\last_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
             -i temp\first_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
             -merged ^
             -single_returns ^
             -o temp\all_32366_5622_1_nw.laz

We then add the synthetic points with another call to lasmerge to obtain a LAZ file containing all points of the tile correctly classified, flagged, and return-numbered.

lasmerge -i temp\dgm1l-ab_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
         -i temp\dgm1l-ag_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
         -i temp\dgm1l-aw_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
         -i temp\all_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
         -o temp\merged_32366_5622_1_nw.laz

Optional: For more efficient use of this file in subsequent processing – and especially to accelerate area-of-interest queries with lasindex – it is often of great advantage to reorder the points in a spatially coherent manner. A simple call to lassort will rearrange the points along a space-filling curve such as a Hilbert curve or a Z-order curve.

lassort -i temp\merged_32366_5622_1_nw.laz ^
        -o bonn_32366_5622_1_nw.laz

Note that we also renamed the file because a good name can be useful if you find that file again in two years from now. Let’s have a look at the result with lasview.

lasview -i bonn_32366_5622_1_nw.laz

In lasview you can press <c> repeatedly to switch through all available coloring modes until you see the yellow (single) / red (first) / last (blue) coloring of the returns. The recovered return types are especially evident under vegetation, in the presence of wires, and along building edges. Press <x> to select an area of interest and press <x> again to inspect it more closely. Press <i> while hovering above a point to show its coordinates, classification, and return type.

We did each processing in separate steps to illustrate the overall workflow. The above sequence of LAStools command line calls can be shortened by combining multiple processing steps into one operation. This is left as an exercise for the advanced LAStools user … (-;

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 … (-:

LiDAR leaks have happened! Black helicopters are in the sky!  A few days ago a tiny tweet leaked the online location of “classified LiDAR” for Washington, DC. This LiDAR really is “classified” and includes an aerial scan of the Pentagon. For rogue scientists world-wide we offer a secret download link. It links to a file code-named ‘pentagon.laz‘ that contains the 8,044,789 “classified” returns of the Pentagon shown below. This “classified file” can be deciphered by any software with native LAZ support. It was encrypted with the “LAS 1.4 compatibility mode” of LASzip. The original LAS 1.4 content was encoded into a inconspicuous-looking LAZ file. New point attributes (such as the scanner channel) were hidden as “extra bytes” for fully lossless encryption. Use ‘laszip‘ to fully decode the original “classified” LAS 1.4 file … (-;

Seriously, a tiled LiDAR data set for the District of Columbia flown in 2015 is available for anyone to use on Amazon S3 with a very permissive open data license, namely the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. The LiDAR coverage can be explored via this interactive map. The tiles are provided in LAS 1.4 format and use the new point type 6. We downloaded a few tiles near the White House, the Capitol, and the Pentagon to test the “native LAS 1.4 extension” of our LASzip compressor which will be released soon (a prototype for testing is already available). As these uncompressed LAS files are YUUUGE we use the command line utility ‘wget‘ for downloading. With option ‘-c’ the download continues where it left off in case the transfer gets interrupted.

LiDAR pulse density from 20 or less (blue) to 100 or more (red) pulses per square meter.

We use lasboundary to create labeled bounding boxes for display in Google Earth and lasgrid to a create false color visualization of pulse density with the command lines shown below. Pulse densities of 20 or below are mapped to blue. Pulse densities of 100 or above are mapped to red. We picked the min value 20 and the max value 100 for this false color mapping by running lasinfo with the ‘-cd’ option to compute an average pulse density and then refining the numbers experimentally. We also use lasoverlap to visualize how flightlines overlap and how well they align. Vertical differences of up to 20 cm are mapped to white and differences of 40 cm or more are mapped to saturated blue or red.

lasboundary -i *.las ^
            -use_bb ^
            -labels ^
            -odir quality -odix _bb -okml

lasgrid -i *.las ^
        -keep_last ^
        -point_density -step 2 ^
        -false -set_min_max 20 100 ^
        -odir quality -odix _d_20_100 -opng ^
        -cores 2

lasoverlap -i *.las ^
           -min_diff 0.2 -max_diff 0.4 ^
           -odir quality -opng ^
           -cores 2

The visualization of the pulse density and of the flightline overlap both show that there is no LiDAR for the White House or Capitol Hill. We will never know how tall the tomato and kale plants had grown in Michelle Obama’s organic garden on that day. Note that the White House and Capitol Hill were not simply “cut out”. Instead the flight plan of the survey plane was carefully designed to avoid these areas. Surprisingly, the Pentagon did not receive the same treatment and is (almost) fully included in the open LiDAR as mentioned in the dramatic first paragraph. Interesting is how the varying (tidal?) water level of the Potomac River shows up in the visualization of flightline miss-alignments.

There are a number of issues in these LiDAR files. The most serious ones are reported at the very end of this article. We will now scrutinize the partly-filled tile 2016.las close to the White House with only 11,060,334 returns. A lasvalidate check immediately reports three deviations from the LAS 1.4 specification:

lasvalidate -i 2016.las -o 2016_check.xml

1. For proper LAS 1.4 files containing point type 6 through 10 all ‘legacy’ point counts in the LAS header should be set to 0. The following six fields in the LAS header should be zero for tile 2016.las (and all other tiles):
   + legacy number of point records
   + legacy number of points by return[0]
   + legacy number of points by return[1]
   + legacy number of points by return[2]
   + legacy number of points by return[3]
   + legacy number of points by return[4]
2. There should not be any LiDAR return in a valid LAS file whose ‘number of returns of given pulse’ attribute is zero but there are 8 such points in tile 2016.las (and many more in various other tiles).
3. There should not be any LiDAR return whose ‘return number’ attribute is larger than their ‘number of returns of given pulse’ attribute but there are 8 such points in tile 2016.las (and many more in various other tiles).

The first issue is trivial. There is an efficient in-place fix that does not require to rewrite the entire file using lasinfo with the following command line:

lasinfo -i 2016.las ^
        -nh -nv -nc ^
        -set_number_of_point_records 0 ^
        -set_number_of_points_by_return 0 0 0 0 0 ^

A quick check with las2txt shows us that the second and third issue are caused by the same eight points. Instead of writing an 8 for the ‘number of returns’ attribute the LAS file exporter must have written a 0 (marked in red for all eight returns) and instead of writing an 8 for the ‘return number’ attribute the LAS file exporter must have written a 1 (also marked in red). We can tell it from the true first return via its z coordinate (marked in blue) as the last return should be the lowest of all.

las2txt -i 2016.las ^
        -keep_number_of_returns 0 ^
        -parse xyzrnt ^
        -stdout
397372.70 136671.62 33.02 4 0 112813299.954811
397372.03 136671.64 28.50 5 0 112813299.954811
397371.28 136671.67 23.48 6 0 112813299.954811
397370.30 136671.68 16.86 7 0 112813299.954811
397369.65 136671.70 12.50 1 0 112813299.954811
397374.37 136671.58 44.17 3 0 112813299.954811
397375.46 136671.56 51.49 1 0 112813299.954811
397374.86 136671.57 47.45 2 0 112813299.954811

With las2las we can change the ‘number of returns’ from 0 to 8 using a ‘-filtered_transform’ as illustrated in the command line below. We suspect that higher number of returns such as 9 or 10 might have been mapped to 1 and 2. Fixing those as well as repairing the wrong return numbers will require a more complex tool. We would recommend to check all tiles with more scrutiny using the lasreturn tool. But wait … more return numbering issues are to come.

las2las -i 2016.las ^
        -keep_number_of_returns 0 ^
        -filtered_transform ^
        -set_extended_number_of_returns 8 ^
        -odix _fixed -olas

A closer look at the scan pattern reveals that the LiDAR survey was flown with a dual-beam system where two laser beams scan the terrain simultaneously. This is evident in the textual representation below as there are multiple “sets of returns” for the same GPS time stamp such as 112813952.110394. We group the returns from the two beams into an orange and a green group. Their coordinates show that the two laser beams point into different directions when they are simultaneously “shot” and therefore hit the terrain far apart from another.

las2txt -i 2016.las ^
        -keep_gps_time 112813952.110392 112813952.110396 ^
        -parse xyzlurntp ^
        -stdout
397271.40 136832.35 54.31 0 0 1 1 112813952.110394 117
397277.36 136793.35 38.68 0 1 1 4 112813952.110394 117
397277.35 136793.56 32.89 0 1 2 4 112813952.110394 117
397277.34 136793.88 24.13 0 1 3 4 112813952.110394 117
397277.32 136794.25 13.66 0 1 4 4 112813952.110394 117

The information about which point is from which beam is currently stored into the generic ‘user data’ attribute instead of into the dedicated ‘scanner channel’ attribute. This can be fixed with las2las as follows.

las2las -i 2016.las ^
        -copy_user_data_into_scanner_channel ^
        -set_user_data 0 ^
        -odix _fixed -olas

Unfortunately the LiDAR files have much more serious issues in the return numbering. It’s literally a “Total Disaster!” and “Sad!” as the US president will tweet shortly. After grouping all returns with the same GPS time stamp into an orange and a green group there is one more set of returns left unaccounted for.

las2txt -i 2016.las ^
        -keep_gps_time 112813951.416451 112813951.416455 ^
        -parse xyzlurntpi ^
        -stdout
397286.02 136790.60 45.90 0 0 1 4 112813951.416453 117 24
397286.06 136791.05 39.54 0 0 2 4 112813951.416453 117 35
397286.10 136791.51 33.34 0 0 3 4 112813951.416453 117 24
397286.18 136792.41 21.11 0 0 4 4 112813951.416453 117 0
397286.12 136791.75 30.07 0 0 1 1 112813951.416453 117 47
397291.74 136750.70 45.86 0 1 1 1 112813951.416453 117 105
las2txt -i 2016.las ^
        -keep_gps_time 112813951.408708 112813951.408712 ^
        -parse xyzlurntpi ^
        -stdout
397286.01 136790.06 45.84 0 0 1 4 112813951.408710 117 7
397286.05 136790.51 39.56 0 0 2 4 112813951.408710 117 15
397286.08 136790.96 33.33 0 0 3 4 112813951.408710 117 19
397286.18 136792.16 17.05 0 0 4 4 112813951.408710 117 0
397286.11 136791.20 30.03 0 0 1 2 112813951.408710 117 58
397286.14 136791.67 23.81 0 0 2 2 112813951.408710 117 42
397291.73 136750.16 45.88 0 1 1 1 112813951.408710 117 142

This can be visualized with lasview and the result is unmistakably clear: The return numbering is messed up. There should be one shot with five returns (not a group of four and a single return) in the first example. And there should be one shot with six returns (not a group of four and a group of two returns) in the second example. Such a broken return numbering results in extra first (or last) returns. These are serious issues that affect any algorithm that relies on the return numbering such as first-return DSM generation or canopy cover computation. Those extra returns will also make the pulse density appear higher and the pulse spacing appear tighter than they really are. The numbers from 20 (blue) to 100 (red) pulses per square meters in our earlier visualization are definitely inflated.

lasview -i 2016.las ^
        -keep_gps_time 112813951.416451 112813951.416455 ^
        -color_by_return

lasview -i 2016.las ^
        -keep_gps_time 112813951.408708 112813951.408712 ^
        -color_by_return

After all these troubles here something nice. Side-by-side a first-return TIN and a spike-free TIN (using a freeze of 0.8 m) of the center court cafe in the Pentagon. Especially given all these “fake first returns” in the Washington DC LiDAR we really need the spike-free algorithm to finally “Make a DSM great again!” … (-;

We would like to acknowledge the District of Columbia Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) for providing this data with a very permissive open data license, namely the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Some professionals in remote sensing find LAStools a useful tool to extract statistical metrics from LiDAR that are used to make estimations about a larger area of land from a small set of sample plots. Common applications are prediction of the timber volume or the above-ground biomass for entire forests based on a number of representative plots where exact measurements were obtained with field work. The same technique can also be used to make estimations about animal habitat or coconut yield or to classify the type of vegetation that covers the land. In this tutorial we describe the typical workflow for computing common metrics for smaller plots and larger areas using LAStools.

Download these six LiDAR tiles (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) from a Eucalyptus plantation in Brazil to follow along the step by step instructions of this tutorial. This data is courtesy of Suzano Pulp and Paper. Please also download the two shapefiles that delineate the plots where field measurements were taken and the stands for which predictions are to be made. You should download version 170327 (or higher) of LAStools due to some recent bug fixes.

Quality Checking

Before processing newly received LiDAR data we always perform a quality check first. This ranges from visual inspection with lasview, to printing textual content reports and attribute histograms with lasinfo, to flight-line alignment checks with lasoverlap, pulse density and pulse spacing checks with lasgrid and las2dem, and completeness-of-returns check with lassort followed by lasreturn.

lasinfo -i tiles_raw\CODL0003-C0006.laz ^
        -odir quality -odix _info -otxt

The lasinfo report tells us that there is no projection information. However, we remember that this Brazilian data was in the common SIRGAS 2000 projection and try for a few likely UTM zones whether the hillshaded DSM produced by las2dem falls onto the right spot in Google Earth.

las2dem -i tiles_raw\CODL0003-C0006.laz ^
        -keep_first -thin_with_grid 1 ^
        -hillshade -epsg 31983 ^
        -o epsg_check.png

Hillshaded DSM and Google Earth imagery align for EPSG code 31983

The lasinfo report also tells us that the xyz coordinates are stored with millimeter resolution which is a bit of an overkill. For higher and faster LASzip compression we will later lower this to a more appropriate centimeter resolution. It further tells us that the returns are stored using point type 0 and that is a bit unfortunate. This (older) point type does not have a GPS time stamp so that some quality checks (e.g. “completeness of returns” with lasreturn) and operations (e.g. “resorting of returns into acquisition order” with lassort) will not be possible. Fortunately the min-max range of the ‘point source ID’ suggests that this point attribute is correctly populated with flightline numbers so that we can do a check for overlap and alignment of the different flightlines that contribute to the LiDAR in each tile.

lasoverlap -i tiles_raw\*.laz ^
           -min_diff 0.2 -max_diff 0.4 ^
           -epsg 31983 ^
           -odir quality -opng ^
           -cores 3

We run lasoverlap to visualize the amount of overlap between flightlines and the vertical differences between them. The produced images (see below) color code the number of flightlines and the maximum vertical difference between any two flightlines as seen below. Most of the area is cyan (2 flightlines) except in the bottom left where the pilot was sloppy and left some gaps in the yellow seams (3 flightlines) so that some spots are only blue (1 flightline). We also see that two tiles in the upper left are partly covered by a diagonal flightline. We will drop that flightline later to create a more uniform density.across the tiles. The mostly blue areas in the difference are mostly aligned with features in the landscape and less with the flightline pattern. Closer inspection shows that these vertical difference occur mainly in the dense old growth forests with species of different heights that are much harder to penetrate by the laser than the uniform and short-lived Eucalyptus plantation that is more of a “dead forest” with little undergrowth or animal habitat.

Interesting observation: The vertical difference of the lowest return from different flightlines computed per 2 meter by 2 meter grid cell could maybe be used a new forestry metric to help distinguish mono cultures from natural forests.

lasgrid -i tiles_raw\*.laz ^
        -keep_last ^
        -step 2 -point_density ^
        -false -set_min_max 10 20 ^
        -epsg 31983 ^
        -odir quality -odix _d_2m_10_20 -opng ^
        -cores 3

lasgrid -i tiles_raw\*.laz ^
        -keep_last ^
        -step 5 -point_density ^
        -false -set_min_max 10 20 ^
        -epsg 31983 ^
        -odir quality -odix _d_5m_10_20 -opng ^
        -cores 3

We run lasgrid to visualize the pulse density per 2 by 2 meter cell and per 5 by 5 meter cell. The produced images (see below) color code the number of last return per square meter. The impact of the tall Eucalyptus trees on the density per cell computation is evident for the smaller 2 meter cell size in form of a noisy blue/red diagonal in the top right as well as a noisy blue/red area in the bottom left. Both of those turn to a more consistent yellow for the density per cell computation with larger 5 meter cells. Immediately evident is the higher density (red) for those parts or the two tiles in the upper left that are covered by the additional diagonal flightline. The blueish area left to the center of the image suggests a consistently lower pulse density whose cause remains to be investigated: Lower reflectivity? Missing last returns? Cloud cover?

The lasinfo report suggests that the tiles are already classified. We could either use the ground classification provided by the vendor or re-classify the data ourselves (using lastile, lasnoise, and lasground). We check the quality of the ground classification by visually inspecting a hillshaded DTM created with las2dem from the ground returns. We buffer the tiles on-the-fly for a seamless hillshade without artifacts along tile boundaries by adding ‘-buffered 25’ and ‘-use_orig_bb’ to the command-line. To speed up reading the 25 meter buffers from neighboring tiles we first create a spatial indexing with lasindex.

lasindex -i tiles_raw\*.laz ^
         -cores 3

las2dem -i tiles_raw\*.laz ^
        -buffered 25 ^
        -keep_class 2 -thin_with_grid 0.5 ^
        -use_orig_bb ^
        -hillshade -epsg 31983 ^
        -odir quality -odix _dtm -opng ^
        -cores 3

hillshaded DTM tiles generated with las2dem and on-the-fly buffering

The resulting hillshaded DTM shows a few minor issues in the ground classification but also a big bump (above the mouse cursor). Closer inspection of this area (you can cut it from the larger tile using the command-line below) shows that there is a group of miss-classified points about 1200 meters below the terrain. Hence, we will start from scratch to prepare the data for the extraction of forestry metrics.

las2las -i tiles_raw\CODL0004-C0006.laz ^
        -inside_tile 207900 7358350 100 ^
        -o bump.laz

lasview -i bump.laz

bump in hillshaded DTM caused by miss-classified low noise

Data Preparation

Using lastile we first tile the data into smaller 500 meter by 500 meter tiles with 25 meter buffer while flagging all points in the buffer as ‘withheld’. In the same step we lower the resolution to centimeter and put nicer a coordinate offset in the LAS header. We also remove the existing classification and classify all points that are much lower than the target terrain as class 7 (aka noise). We also add CRS information and give each tile the base name ‘suzana.laz’.

lastile -i tiles_raw\*.laz ^
        -rescale 0.01 0.01 0.01 ^
        -auto_reoffset ^
        -set_classification 0 ^
        -classify_z_below_as 500.0 7 ^
        -tile_size 500 ^
        -buffer 25 -flag_as_withheld ^
        -epsg 31983 ^
        -odir tiles_buffered -o suzana.laz

With lasnoise we mark the many isolated points that are high above or below the terrain as class 7 (aka noise). Using two tiles we played around with the ‘step’ parameters until we find good parameter settings. See the README of lasnoise for the exact meaning and the choice of parameters for noise classification. We look at one of the resulting tiles with lasview.

lasnoise -i tiles_buffered\*.laz ^
         -step_xy 4 -step_z 2 ^
         -odir tiles_denoised -olaz ^
         -cores 3

lasview -i tiles_denoised\suzana_206000_7357000.laz ^
        -color_by_classification ^
        -win 1024 192

noise points shown in pink: all points (top), only noise points (bottom)

Next we use lasground to classify the last returns into ground (2) and non-ground (1). It is important to ignore the noise points with classification 7 to avoid the kind of bump we saw in the vendor-delivered classification. We again check the quality of the computed ground classification by producing a hillshaded DTM with las2dem. Here the las2dem command-line is sightly different as instead of buffering on-the-fly we use the buffers stored with each tile.

lasground -i tiles_denoised\*.laz ^
          -ignore_class 7 ^
          -nature -extra_fine ^
          -odir tiles_ground -olaz ^
          -cores 3

las2dem -i tiles_ground\*.laz ^
        -keep_class 2 -thin_with_grid 0.5 ^
        -hillshade ^
        -use_tile_bb ^
        -odir quality -odix _dtm_new -opng ^
        -cores 3

Finally, with lasheight we compute how high each return is above the triangulated surface of all ground returns and store this height value in place of the elevation value into the z coordinate using the ‘-replace_z’ switch. This height-normalizes the LiDAR in the sense that all ground returns are set to an elevation of 0 while all other returns get an elevation relative to the ground. The result are height-normalized LiDAR tiles that are ready for producing the desired forestry metrics.

lasheight -i tiles_ground\*.laz ^
          -replace_z ^
          -odir tiles_normalized -olaz ^
          -cores 3

Metric Production

The tool for computing the metrics for the entire area as well as for the individual field plots is lascanopy. Which metrics are well suited for your particular imputation calculation is your job to determine. Maybe first compute a large number of them and then eliminate the redundant ones. Do not use any point from the tile buffers for these calculations. We had flagged them as ‘withheld’ during the lastile operation, so they are easy to drop. We also want to drop the noise points that were classified as 7. And we were planning to drop that additional diagonal flightline we noticed during quality checking. We generated two lasinfo reports with the ‘-histo point_source 1’ option for the two tiles it was covering. From the two histograms it was easy to see that the diagonal flightline has the number 31.

First we run lascanopy on the 11 plots that you can download here. When running on plots it makes sense to first create a spatial indexing with lasindex for faster querying so that only those tiny parts of the LAZ file need to be loaded that actually cover the plots.

lasindex -i tiles_normalized\*.laz ^
         -cores 3

lascanopy -i tiles_normalized\*.laz -merged ^
          -drop_withheld ^
          -drop_class 7 ^
          -drop_point_source 31 ^
          -lop WKS_PLOTS.shp ^
          -cover_cutoff 3.0 ^
          -cov -dns ^
          -height_cutoff 2.0 ^
          -c 2.0 999.0 ^
          -max -avg -std -kur ^
          -p 25 50 75 95 ^
          -b 30 50 80 ^
          -d 2.0 5.0 10.0 50.0 ^
          -o plots.csv

The resulting ‘plots.csv’ file you can easily process in other software packages. It contains one line for each polygonal plot listed in the shapefile that lists its bounding box followed by all the requested metrics. But is why is there a zero maximum height (marked in orange) for plots 6 though 10? All height metrics are computed solely from returns that are higher than the ‘height_cutoff’ that was set to 2 meters. We added the ‘-c 2.0 999.0’ absolute count metric to keep track of the number of returns used in these calculations. Apparently in plots 6 though 10 there was not a single return above 2 meters as the count (also marked in orange) is zero for all these plots. Turns out this Eucalyptus stand had recently been harvested and the new seedlings are still shorter than 2 meters.

more plots.csv
index,min_x,min_y,max_x,max_y,max,avg,std,kur,p25,p50,p75,p95,b30,b50,b80,c00,d00,d01,d02,cov,dns
0,206260.500,7358289.909,206283.068,7358312.477,11.23,6.22,1.91,2.26,4.71,6.01,7.67,9.5,26.3,59.7,94.2,5359,18.9,41.3,1.5,76.3,60.0
1,206422.500,7357972.909,206445.068,7357995.477,13.54,7.5,2.54,1.97,5.32,7.34,9.65,11.62,26.9,54.6,92.2,7030,12.3,36.6,13.3,77.0,61.0
2,206579.501,7358125.909,206602.068,7358148.477,12.22,5.72,2.15,2.5,4.11,5.32,7.26,9.76,46.0,73.7,97.4,4901,24.8,28.7,2.0,66.8,51.2
3,206578.500,7358452.910,206601.068,7358475.477,12.21,5.68,2.23,2.64,4.01,5.14,7.18,10.04,48.3,74.1,95.5,4861,25.7,26.2,2.9,68.0,50.2
4,206734.501,7358604.910,206757.068,7358627.478,15.98,10.3,2.18,2.64,8.85,10.46,11.9,13.65,3.3,27.0,91.0,4946,0.6,32.5,44.5,91.0,77.5
5,207043.501,7358761.910,207066.068,7358784.478,15.76,10.78,2.32,3.43,9.27,11.03,12.49,14.11,3.2,20.7,83.3,4819,1.5,24.7,51.0,91.1,76.8
6,207677.192,7359630.526,207699.760,7359653.094,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.0,0.0,0.0,0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0
7,207519.291,7359372.366,207541.859,7359394.934,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.0,0.0,0.0,0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0
8,207786.742,7359255.850,207809.309,7359278.417,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.0,0.0,0.0,0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0
9,208159.017,7358997.344,208181.584,7359019.911,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.0,0.0,0.0,0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0
10,208370.909,7358602.565,208393.477,7358625.133,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.0,0.0,0.0,0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0

Then we run lascanopy on the entire area and produce one raster per tile for each metric. Here we remove the buffered points with the ‘-use_tile_bb’ switch that also ensures that the produced rasters have exactly the extend of the tiles without buffers. Again, it is imperative that you download the version 170327 (or higher) of LAStools for this to work correctly.

lascanopy -version
LAStools (by martin@rapidlasso.com) version 170327 (academic)

lascanopy -i tiles_normalized\*.laz ^
          -use_tile_bb ^
          -drop_class 7 ^
          -drop_point_source 31 ^
          -step 10 ^
          -cover_cutoff 3.0 ^
          -cov -dns ^
          -height_cutoff 2.0 ^
          -c 2.0 999.0 ^
          -max -avg -std -kur ^
          -p 25 50 75 95 ^
          -b 30 50 80 ^
          -d 2.0 5.0 10.0 50.0 ^
          -odir tile_metrics -oasc ^
          -cores 3

The resulting rasters in ASC format can easily be previewed using lasview for some “sanity checking” that our metrics make sense and to get a quick overview about what these metrics look like.

lasview -i tile_metrics\suzana_*max.asc
lasview -i tile_metrics\suzana_*p95.asc
lasview -i tile_metrics\suzana_*p50.asc
lasview -i tile_metrics\suzana_*p25.asc
lasview -i tile_metrics\suzana_*cov.asc
lasview -i tile_metrics\suzana_*d00.asc
lasview -i tile_metrics\suzana_*d01.asc
lasview -i tile_metrics\suzana_*b30.asc
lasview -i tile_metrics\suzana_*b80.asc

The maximum height rasters are useful to inspect more closely as they will immediately tell us if there was any high noise point that slipped through the cracks. And indeed it happened as we see a maximum of 388.55 meters for of the 10 by 10 meter cells. As we know the expected height of the trees we could have added a ‘-drop_z_above 70’ to the lascanopy command line. Careful, however, when computing forestry metrics in strongly sloped terrains as the terrain slope can significantly lift up returns to heights much higher than that of the tree. This is guaranteed to happen for LiDAR returns from branches that are extending horizontally far over the down-sloped part of the terrain as shown in this paper here.

We did not use the shapefile for the stands in this exercise. We could have clipped the normalized LiDAR points to these stands using lasclip as shown in the GUI below before generating the raster metrics. This would have saved space and computation time as many of the LiDAR points lie outside of the stands. However, it might be better to do that clipping step on the rasters in whichever GIS software or statistics package you are using for the imputation computation to properly account for partly covered raster cells along the stand boundary. This could be subject of another blog article … (-:

not all LiDAR was needed to compute metrics for

Muriel Lavy (recipient of three LASmoons)
RED (Risk Evaluation Dashboard) project
ISE-Net s.r.l, Aosta, ITALY.

Background:
The Aosta Valley Region is a mountainous area in the heart of the Alps. This region is regularly affected by hazard natural phenomena connected with the terrain geomorphometry and the climate change: snow avalanche, rockfalls and landslide.
In July 2016 a research program, funded by the European Program for the Regional Development, aims to create a cloud dashboard for the monitoring, the control and the analysis of several parameters and data derived from advanced sensors: multiparametrical probes, aerial and oblique photogrammetry and laser scanning. This tool will help the territory management agencies to improve the risk mitigation and management system.

The RIEGL VZ-4000 scanning the Aosta Valley Region in Italy.

Goal:
This study aims to classify the point clouds derived from aerial imagery integrated with laser scanning data in order to generate accurate DTM, DSM and Digital Snow Models. The photogrammetry data set was acquired with a Nikon D810 camera from an helicopter survey. The aim of further analysis is to detect changes of natural dynamic phenomena that have occurred via volume analysis and mass balance evaluation.

Data:
+ The photogrammetry data set was acquired with an RGB camera (Nikon D810) with a focal length equivalent of 50 mm from a helicopter survey: 1060 JPG images
+ The laser scanner data set was acquired using a Terrestrial Laser Scanner (RIEGL VZ-4000) combined with a Leica GNSS device (GS25) to georeference the project. The TLS dataset was then used as base reference to properly align and georeference the photogrammetry point cloud.

LAStools processing:
1) check the reference system and the point cloud density [lasinfo, lasvalidate]
2) remove isolated noise points [lasnoise]
3) classify point into ground and non-ground [lasground]
4) classify point clouds into vegetation and other [lasclassify]
5) create DTM and DSM  [las2dem, lasgrid, blast2dem]
6) produce 3D visualizations to facilitate the communication and the interaction [lasview]

Gudrun Norstedt (recipient of three LASmoons)
Forest History, Department of Forest Ecology and Management
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Umeå, Sweden

Background:
Until the end of the 17th century, the vast boreal forests of the interior of northern Sweden were exclusively populated by the indigenous Sami. When settlers of Swedish and Finnish ethnicity started to move into the area, colonization was fast. Although there is still a prospering reindeer herding Sami culture in northern Sweden, the old Sami culture that dominated the boreal forest for centuries or even millenia is to a large extent forgotten.
Since each forest Sami family formerly had a number of seasonal settlements, the density of settlements must have been high. However, only very few remains are known today. In the field, old Sami settlements can be recognized through the presence of for example stone hearths, storage caches, pits for roasting pine bark, foundations of certain types of huts, reindeer pens, and fences. Researchers of the Forest History section of the Department of Forest Ecology and Management have long been surveying such remains on foot. This, however, is extremely time consuming and can only be done in limited areas. Also, the use of aerial photographs is usually difficult due to dense vegetation. Data from airborne laser scanning should be the best way to find remains of the old forest Sami culture. Previous research has shown the possibilities of using airborne laser scanning data for detecting cultural remains in the boreal forest (Jansson et al., 2009; Koivisto & Laulamaa, 2012; Risbøl et al., 2013), but no studies have aimed at detecting remains of the forest Sami culture. I want to test the possibilities of ALS in this respect.

DTM from the Krycklan catchment, showing a row of hunting pits and (larger) a tar pit.

Goal:
The goal of my study is to test the potential of using LiDAR data for detecting cultural and archaeological remains on the ground in a forest area where Sami have been known to dwell during historical times. Since the whole of Sweden is currently being scanned by the National Land Survey, this data will be included. However, the average point density of the national data is only 0,5–1 pulses/m^2. Therefore, the study will be done in an established research area, the Krycklan catchment, where a denser scanning was performed in 2015. The Krycklan data set lacks ground point classification, so I will have to perform such a classification before I can proceed to the creation of a DTM. Having tested various kind of software, I have found that LAStools seems to be the most efficient way to do the job. This, in turn, has made me aware of the importance of choosing the right methods and parameters for doing a classification that is suitable for archaeological purposes.

Data:
The data was acquired with a multi-spectral airborne LiDAR sensor, the Optech Titan, and a Micro IRS IMU, operated on an aircraft flying at a height of about 1000 m and positioning was post-processed with the TerraPos software for higher accuracy.
+ The average pulse density is 20 pulse/m^2.
+ About 7 000 hectares were covered by the scanning. The data is stored in 489 tiles.

LAStools processing:
1) run a series of classifications of a few selected tiles with both lasground and lasground_new with various parameters [lasground and lasground_new]
2) test the outcomes by comparing it to known terrain to find out the optimal parameters for classifying this particular LiDAR point cloud for archaeological purposes.
3) extract the bare-earth of all tiles (using buffers!!!) with the best parameters [lasground or lasground_new]
4) create bare-earth terrain rasters (DTMs) and analyze the area [lasdem]
5) reclassify the airborne LiDAR data collected by the National Land Survey using various parameters to see whether it can become more suitable for revealing Sami cultural remains in a boreal forest landscape  [lasground or lasground_new]

References:
Jansson, J., Alexander, B. & Söderman, U. 2009. Laserskanning från flyg och fornlämningar i skog. Länsstyrelsen Dalarna (PDF).
Koivisto, S. & Laulamaa, V. 2012. Pistepilvessä – Metsien arkeologiset kohteet LiDAR-ilmalaserkeilausaineistoissa. Arkeologipäivät 2012 (PDF).
Risbøl, O., Bollandsås, O.M., Nesbakken, A., Ørka, H.O., Næsset, E., Gobakken, T. 2013. Interpreting cultural remains in airborne laser scanning generated digital terrain models: effects of size and shape on detection success rates. Journal of Archaeological Science 40:4688–4700.

Marzena Wicht (recipient of three LASmoons)
Department of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and GIS
Warsaw University of Technology, Poland.

Background:
More than half of human population (Heilig 2012) suffers from many negative effects of living in cities: increased air pollution, limited access to the green areas, Urban Heat Island (UHI) and many more. To mitigate some of these effects, many ideas came up over the years: reducing the surface albedo, the idea of the Garden City, green belts, and so on. Increasing horizontal wind speed might actually improve both, the air pollution dispersion and the thermal comfort in urban areas (Gál & Unger 2009). Areas of low roughness promote air flow – discharging the city from warm, polluted air and supplying it with cool and fresh air – if they share specific parameters, are connected and penetrate the inner city with a country breeze. That is why mapping low roughness urban areas is important in better understanding urban climate.

Goal:
The goal of this study is to derive buildings (outlines and height) and high vegetation using LAStools and to use that data in mapping urban ventilation corridors for our case study area in Warsaw. There are many ways to map these; however using ALS data has certain advantages (Suder& Szymanowski 2014) in this case: DSMs can be easily derived, tree canopy (incl. height) can be joined to the analysis and buildings can be easily extracted. The outputs are then used as a basis for morphological analysis, like calculating frontal area index. LAStools has the considerable advantage of processing large quantities of data (~500 GB) efficiently.

Frontal area index calculation based on 3D building database

Data:
+ LiDAR provided by Central Documentation Center of Geodesy and Cartography
+ average pulse density 12 p/m^2
+ covers 517 km^2 (whole Warsaw)

LAStools processing:
1) quality checking of the data as described in several videos and blog posts [lasinfo, lasvalidate, lasoverlap, lasgrid, lasduplicate, lasreturn, las2dem]
2) reorganize data into sufficiently small tiles with buffers to avoid edge artifacts [lastile]
3) classify point clouds into vegetation and buildings [lasground, lasclassify]
4) normalize LiDAR heights [lasheight]
5) create triangulated, rasterized derivatives: DSM / DTM / nDSM / CHM [las2dem, blast2dem]
6) compute height-based metrics (e.g. ‘-avg’, ‘-std’, and ‘-p 50’) [lascanopy]
7) generate subsets during the workflow [lasclip]
8) generate building footprints [lasboundary]

References:
Heilig, G. K. (2012). World urbanization prospects: the 2011 revision. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), Population Division, Population Estimates and Projections Section, New York.
Gal, T., & Unger, J. (2009). Detection of ventilation paths using high-resolution roughness parameter mapping in a large urban area. Building and Environment, 44(1), 198-206.
Suder, A., & Szymanowski, M. (2014). Determination of ventilation channels in urban area: A case study of Wroclaw (Poland). Pure and Applied Geophysics, 171(6), 965-975.

The biggest problem of generating a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) from the photogrammetric point clouds that are produced from aerial imagery with dense-matching software such as SURE, Pix4D, or Photoscan is dense vegetation: when plants completely cover the terrain not a single point is generated on the ground. This is different for LiDAR point clouds as the laser can even penetrate dense multi-level tropical forests. The complete lack of ground points in larger vegetated areas such as closed forests or dense plantations means that the many processing workflows for vegetation analysis that have been developed for LiDAR cannot be used for photogrammetric point clouds  … unless … well unless we are getting those missing ground points some other way. In the following we see how to integrate external ground points to generate a reasonable DTM under a dense forest with LAStools. See this, this, this, this, and this article for further reading.

Here you can download the dense matching point cloud, the manually collected ground points, and the forest stand delineating polygon that we are using in the following example work flow:

• dense matching point cloud
• manually collected ground points
• forest stand delineating polygon

We leave the usual inspection of the content with lasinfo and lasview that we always recommend on newly obtained data as an exercise to the reader. Using las2dem and lasgrid we created the Google Earth overlays shown above to visualize the extent of the dense matched point cloud and the distribution of the manually collected ground points:

las2dem -i DenseMatching.laz ^
        -thin_with_grid 1.0 ^
        -extra_pass ^
        -step 2.0 ^
        -hillshade ^
        -odix _hill_2m -opng

lasgrid -i ManualGround.laz ^
        -set_RGB 255 0 0 ^
        -step 10 -rgb ^
        -odix _grid_10m -opng

Attempts to ground-classify the dense matching point cloud directly are futile as there are no ground points under the canopy in the heavily forested area. Therefore 558 ground points were manually surveyed in the forest of interest that are around 50 to 120 meters apart from another. We show how to integrate these points into the dense matching point cloud such that we can successfully extract bare-earth information from the data.

In the first step we “densify” the manually collected ground points by interpolating them with triangles onto a raster of 2 meter resolution that we store as LAZ points with las2dem. You could consider other interpolation schemes to “densify” the ground points, here we use simple linear interpolation to prove the concept. Due to the varying distance between the manually surveyed ground points we allow interpolating triangles with edge lengths of up to 125 meters. These triangles then also cover narrow open areas next to the forest, so we clip the interpolated ground points against the forest stand delineating polygon with lasclip to classify those points that are really in the forest as “key points” (class 8) and all others as “noise” (class 7).

las2dem -i ManualGround.laz ^
        -step 2 ^
        -kill 125 ^
        -odix _2m -olaz

lasclip -i ManualGround_2m.laz ^
        -set_classification 7 ^
        -poly forest.shp ^
        -classify_as 8 -interior ^
        -odix _forest -olaz

Below we show the resulting densified ground points colored by elevation that survive the clipping against the forest stand delineating polygon and were classified as “key points” (class 8). The interpolated ground points in narrow open areas next to the forest that fall outside this polygon were classified as “noise” (class 7) and are shown in violet. They will be dropped in the next step.

We then merge the dense matching points with the densified manual ground points (while dropping all the violet points marked as noise) as input to lasthin and reclassify the lowest point per 1 meter by 1 meter with a temporary code (here we use class 9 that usually refers to “water”). Only the subset of lowest points that receives the temporary classification code 9 will be used for ground classification later.

lasthin -i DenseMatching.laz ^
        -i ManualGround_2m_forest.laz ^
        -drop_class 7 ^
        -merged ^
        -lowest -step 1 -classify_as 9 ^
        -o DenseMatchingAndDensifiedGround.laz

We use the GUI of lasview to pick several interesting areas for visual inspection. The selected points load much faster when the LAZ file is spatially indexed and therefore we first run lasindex. For better orientation we also load the forest stand delineating polygon as an overlay into the GUI.

lasindex -i DenseMatchingAndDensifiedGround.laz

lasview -i DenseMatchingAndDensifiedGround.laz -gui

We pick the area shown below that contains the target forest with manually collected and densified ground points and a forested area with only dense matching points. The difference could not be more drastic as the visualizations show.

Now we run ground classification using lasground with option ‘-town’ using only the points with the temporary code 9 by ignoring all other classifications 0 and 8 in the file. We leave the temporary classification code 9 unchanged for all the points that were not classified with “ground” code 2 so we can visualize later which ones those are.

lasground -i DenseMatchingAndDensifiedGround.laz ^
          -ignore_class 0 8 ^
          -town ^
          -non_ground_unchanged ^
          -o GroundClassified.laz

We again use the GUI of lasview to pick several interesting areas after running lasindex and again load the forest stand delineating polygon as an overlay into the GUI.

lasindex -i GroundClassified.laz

lasview -i GroundClassified.laz -gui

We pick the area shown below that contains all three scenarios: the target forest with manually collected and densified ground points, an open area with only dense matching points, and a forested area with only dense matching points. The result is as expected: in the target forest the manually collected ground points are used as ground and in the open area the dense-matching points are used as ground. But there is no useful ground in the other forested area.

Now we can compute the heights of the points above ground for our target forest with lasheight and either replace the z elevations in the file of store them separately as “extra bytes”. Then we can compute, for example, a Canopy Height Model (CHM) that color codes the height of the vegetation above the ground with lasgrid. Of course this will only be correct in the target forest where we have “good” ground but not in the other forested areas. We also compute a hillshaded DTM to be able to visually inspect the topography of the generated terrain model.

lasheight -i GroundClassified.laz ^
          -store_as_extra_bytes ^
          -o GroundClassifiedWithHeights.laz

lasgrid -i GroundClassifiedWithHeights.laz ^
        -step 2 ^
        -highest -attribute 0 ^
        -false -set_min_max 0 25 ^
        -o chm.png

las2dem -i GroundClassified.laz ^
        -keep_class 2 -extra_pass ^
        -step 2 ^
        -hillshade ^
        -o dtm.png

Here you can download the resulting color-coded CHM and the resulting hill-shaded DTM as Google Earth KMZ overlays. Clearly the resulting CHM is only meaningful in the target forest where we used the manually collected ground points to create a reasonable DTM. In the other forested areas the ground is only correct near the forest edges and gets worse with increasing distance from open areas. The resulting DTM exhibits some interesting looking  bumps in the middle of areas with manually collected ground point. Those are a result of using the dense-matching points as ground whenever their elevation is lower than that of the manually collected points (which is decided in the lasthin step). Whether those bumps represent true elevations of are artifacts of low erroneous elevation from dense-matching remains to be investigated.

For forests on complex and steep terrain the number of ground points that needs to be manually collected may make such an approach infeasible in practice. However, maybe you have another source of elevation, such as a low-resolution DTM of 10 or 25 meter provided by your local government. Or maybe even a high resolution DTM of 1 or 2 meter from a LiDAR survey you did several years ago. While the forest may have grown a lot in the past years, the ground under the forest will probably not have changed much …

Point clouds produced with dense-matching by photogrammetry software such as SURE, Pix4D, or Photoscan can include a fair amount of the kind of “low noise” as seen below. Low noise causes trouble when attempting to construct a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) from the points as common algorithm for classifying points into ground and non-ground points – such as lasground – tend to “latch onto” those low points, thereby producing a poor representation of the terrain. This blog post describes one possible LAStools workflow for eliminating excessive low noise. It was developed after a question in the LAStools user forum by LASmoons holder Muriel Lavy who was able to share her noisy data with us. See this, this, this, this, this, and this blog post for further reading on this topic.

Here you can download the dense matching point cloud that we are using in the following work flow:

• dense matching point cloud

We leave the usual inspection of the content with lasinfo, lasview, and lasvalidate that we always recommend on newly obtained data as an exercise to the reader. Note that a check for proper alignment of flightlines with lasoverlap that we consider mandatory for LiDAR data is not applicable for dense-matching points.

lastile -i muriel\20161127_Pancalieri_UTM.laz ^
        -tile_size 500 -buffer 25 -flag_as_withheld ^
        -epsg 32632 ^
        -odir muriel\tiles_raw -o panca.laz

lassort -i muriel\tiles_raw\panca*.laz ^
        -odir muriel\tiles_sorted -olaz ^
        -cores 7

lasthin -i muriel\tiles_sorted\panca*.laz ^
        -step 2.5 ^
        -highest -classify_as 8 ^
        -odir muriel\tiles_thinned -olaz ^
        -cores 7

lasnoise -i muriel\tiles_thinned\panca*.laz ^
         -ignore_class 0 ^
         -step_xy 5 -step_z 0.1 -isolated 4 ^
         -classify_as 7 ^
         -odir muriel\tiles_isolated -olaz ^
         -cores 7

lasground -i muriel\tiles_isolated\panca*.laz ^
          -city -ultra_fine -ignore_class 0 7 ^
          -odir muriel\tiles_temp_ground -olaz ^
          -cores 7

lasheight -i muriel\tiles_temp_ground\panca*.laz ^
          -do_not_store_in_user_data ^
          -classify_below -0.5 12 ^
          -odir muriel\tiles_temp_denoised -olaz ^
          -cores 7

las2las -i muriel\tiles_temp_denoised\panca*.laz ^
        -change_classification_from_to 1 0 ^
        -change_classification_from_to 2 0 ^
        -change_classification_from_to 7 0 ^
        -change_classification_from_to 12 7 ^
        -odir muriel\tiles_denoised -olaz ^
        -cores 7

lasground -i muriel\tiles_denoised\panca*.laz ^
          -ignore_class 7 ^
          -city -ultra_fine ^
          -odir muriel\tiles_ground -olaz ^
          -cores 7

las2dem -i muriel\tiles_ground\panca*.laz ^
        -keep_class 2 ^
        -step 1 -hillshade ^
        -use_tile_bb ^
        -odir muriel\tiles_dtm -opng ^
        -cores 7

And here the original DSM side-by-side with resulting DTM after low noise removal. One dense forested area near the center of the data was not entirely removed due to the lack of ground points in this area. Integrating external ground points or manual editing with lasview are two possible way to rectify these few remaining errors …

Huaibo Mu (recipient of three LASmoons)
Environmental Mapping, Department of Geography
University College London (UCL), UK

Background:
This study is a part of the EU-funded Metrology for Earth Observation and Climate project (MetEOC-2). It aims to combine terrestrial and airborne LiDAR data to estimate biomass and allometry for woodland trees in the UK. Airborne LiDAR can capture large amounts of data over large areas, while terrestrial LiDAR can provide much more details of high quality in specific areas. The biomass and allometry for individual specific tree species in 1 ha of Wytham Woods located about 5km north west of the University of Oxford, UK are estimated by combining both airborne and terrestrial LiDAR. Then the bias will be evaluated when estimation are applied on different levels: terrestrial LiDAR level, tree level, and area level. The goal are better insights and a controllable error range in the bias of biomass and allometry estimates for woodland trees based on airborne LiDAR.

Goal:
The study aims to find the suitable parameters of allometric equations for different specific species and establish the relationship between the tree height and stem diameter and crown diameter to be able to estimate the above ground biomass using airborne LiDAR. The biomass estimates under different levels are then compared to evaluate the bias and for the total 6ha of Wytham Woods for calibration and validation. Finally the results are to be applied to other woodlands in the UK. The LiDAR processing tasks for which LAStools are used mainly center around the creation of suitable a Canopy Height Model (CHM) from the airborne LiDAR.

Data:
+ Airborne LiDAR data produced by Professor David Coomes (University of Cambridge) with Airborne Research and Survey Facility (ARSF) Project code of RG13_08 in June 2014. The average point density is about 5.886 per m^2.
+ Terrestrial LiDAR data collected by UCL’s team leader by Dr. Mat Disney and Dr. Kim Calders in order to develop very detailed 3D models of the trees.
+ Fieldwork from the project “Initial Results from Establishment of a Long-term Broadleaf Monitoring Plot at Wytham Woods, Oxford, UK” by Butt et al. (2009).

LAStools processing:
1) check LiDAR quality as described in these videos and articles [lasinfo, lasvalidate, lasoverlap, lasgrid, las2dem]
2) classify into ground and non-ground points using tile-based processing  [lastile, lasground]
3) generate a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) [las2dem]
4) compute height of points and delete points higher than maximum tree height obtained from terrestrial LiDAR [lasheight]
5) convert points into disks with 10 cm diameter to conservatively account for laser beam width [lasthin]
6) generate spike-free Digital Surface Model (DSM) based on algorithm by Khosravipour et al. (2016) [las2dem]
7) create Canopy Height Model (CHM) by subtracting DTM from spike-free DSM [lasheight].

References:
Butt, N., Campbell, G., Malhi, Y., Morecroft, M., Fenn, K., & Thomas, M. (2009). Initial results from establishment of a long-term broadleaf monitoring plot at Wytham Woods, Oxford, UK. University Oxford, Oxford, UK, Rep.
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.
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)
October 2, 2017
rapidlasso GmbH, Gilching, Germany

At INTERGEO 2017 in Berlin, rapidlasso GmbH – the makers of the popular LiDAR processing software LAStools – were awarded top honors in both of the categories they had been nominated for: most innovative software and most innovative startup. The third award for most innovative hardware went to Leica Geosystems for the BLK360 terrestrial scanner. The annual Wichman Innovation Awards have been part of INTERGEO for six years now. Already at the inaugural event in 2012 the open source LiDAR compressor LASzip of rapidlasso GmbH had been nominated, coming in as runner-up in second place.

Dr. Martin Isenburg, the founder and CEO of rapidlasso GmbH, receives the two innovation awards at the ceremony during INTERGEO 2017 in Berlin.

After receiving the two awards Dr. Martin Isenburg, the founder and CEO of rapidlasso GmbH, was quick to thank the “fun, active, and dedicated user community” of the LAStools software for their “incredible support in the online voting”. He pointed out that it was its users who make LAStools more than just an efficient software for processing point clouds. Since 2011, the community surrounding LAStools has constantly grown to several thousand users who help and motivate each other in designing workflows and in solving format issues and processing challenges. They are an integral part of what makes these tools so valuable, so Dr. Isenburg.

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.

Following the lead of England and Wales, the Scottish LiDAR is now also open data. The implementation of such an open geospatial policy in the United Kingdom was spear-headed by the Environment Agency of England who started to make all of their LiDAR holdings available as open data. In September 2015 they opened DTM and DSM raster derivatives down to 25 cm resolution and in March 2016 also the raw point clouds went online our compressed and open LAZ format (more info here) – all with the very permissible Open Government Licence v3. This treasure cove of geospatial data was collected by the Environment Agency Geomatics own survey aircraft mainly for flood mapping purposes. The data that had been access restricted for the past 17 years of operation and was made open only after it was shown that restricting access in order to recover costs to finance future operations – a common argument for withholding tax-payer funded data – was nothing but an utter myth. This open data policy has resulted in an incredible re-use of the LiDAR and the Environment Agency has literally been propelled into the role of a “champion for open data” inspiring Wales (possibly the German states of North-Rhine Westfalia and Thuringia) and now also Scotland to open up their geospatial archives as well …

Huge LAS files available for download from the Scottish Open Data portal.

We went to the nice online portal of Scotland to download three files from the Phase II LiDAR for Scotland that are provided as uncompressed LAS files, namely LAS_NN45NE.las, LAS_NN55NE.las, and LAS_NN55NW.las, whose sizes are listed as 1.2 GB, 2.8 GB, and 4.7 GB in the screenshot above. Needless to say that it took quite some time and several restarts (using wget with option ‘-c’) to successfully download these very large LAS files.

laszip -i LAS_NN45NE.las -odix _cm -olaz -rescale 0.01 0.01 0.01 
laszip -i LAS_NN45NE.las -odix _mm -olaz
laszip -i LAS_NN55NE.las -odix _cm -olaz -rescale 0.01 0.01 0.01 
laszip -i LAS_NN55NE.las -odix _mm -olaz
laszip -i LAS_NN55NW.las -odix _cm -olaz -rescale 0.01 0.01 0.01 
laszip -i LAS_NN55NW.las -odix _mm -olaz

After downloading we decided to see how well these files compress with LASzip by running the six commands shown above creating LAZ files when re-scaling of coordinate resolution to centimeter (cm) and LAZ files with the original millimeter (mm) coordinate resolution (i.e. the original scale factors are 0.001 which is somewhat excessive for aerial LiDAR where the error in position per coordinate is typically between 5 cm and 20 cm). Below you see the resulting file sizes for the three different files.

 1,164,141,247 LAS_NN45NE.las
   124,351,690 LAS_NN45NE_cm.laz (1 : 9.4)
   146,651,719 LAS_NN45NE_mm.laz (1 : 7.9)
 2,833,123,863 LAS_NN55NE.las
   396,521,115 LAS_NN55NE_cm.laz (1 : 7.1)
   474,767,495 LAS_NN55NE_mm.laz (1 : 6.0)
 4,664,782,671 LAS_NN55NW.las
   531,454,473 LAS_NN55NW_cm.laz (1 : 8.8)
   629,141,151 LAS_NN55NW_mm.laz (1 : 7.4)

The savings in download time and storage space of storing the LiDAR in LAZ versus LAS are sixfold to tenfold. If I was a tax payer in Scotland and if my government was hosting open data on in the Amazon cloud (i.e. paying for AWS cloud services with my taxes) I would encourage them to store their data in a more compressed format. Some more details on the data.

According to the provided meta data, the Scottish Public Sector LiDAR Phase II dataset was commissioned by the Scottish Government in response to the Flood Risk Management Act (2009). The project was managed by Sniffer and the contract was awarded to Fugro BKS. Airborne LiDAR data was collected for 66 sites (the dataset does not have full national coverage) totaling 3,516 km^2 between 29th November 2012 and 18th April 2014. The point density was a minimum of 1 point/sqm, and approximately 2 points/sqm on average. A DTM and DSM were produced from the point clouds, with 1m spatial resolution. The Coordinate reference system is OSGB 1936 / British National Grid (EPSG code 27700). The data is licensed under an Open Government Licence. However, under the use constraints section it now only states that the following attribution statement must be used to acknowledge the source of the information: “Copyright Scottish Government and SEPA (2014)” but also that Fugro retain the commercial copyright, which is somewhat disconcerting and may require more clarification. According to this tweet a lesser license (NCGL) applies to the raw LiDAR point clouds. Below a lasinfo report for the large LAS_NN55NW.las as well as several visualizations with lasview.

lasinfo (170915) report for LAS_NN55NW.las
reporting all LAS header entries:
 file signature: 'LASF'
 file source ID: 0
 global_encoding: 1
 project ID GUID data 1-4: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000
 version major.minor: 1.2
 system identifier: 'Riegl LMS-Q'
 generating software: 'Fugro LAS Processor'
 file creation day/year: 343/2016
 header size: 227
 offset to point data: 227
 number var. length records: 0
 point data format: 1
 point data record length: 28
 number of point records: 166599373
 number of points by return: 149685204 14102522 2531075 280572 0
 scale factor x y z: 0.001 0.001 0.001
 offset x y z: 250050 755050 270
 min x y z: 250000.000 755000.000 203.731
 max x y z: 254999.999 759999.999 491.901
reporting minimum and maximum for all LAS point record entries ...
 X -50000 4949999
 Y -50000 4949999
 Z -66269 221901
 intensity 39 2046
 return_number 1 4
 number_of_returns 1 4
 edge_of_flight_line 0 1
 scan_direction_flag 1 1
 classification 1 11
 scan_angle_rank -30 30
 user_data 0 3
 point_source_ID 66 91
 gps_time 38230669.389034 38402435.753789
number of first returns: 149685204
number of intermediate returns: 2813604
number of last returns: 149687616
number of single returns: 135599244
overview over number of returns of given pulse: 135599244 23122229 6754118 1123782 0 0 0
histogram of classification of points:
 287819 unclassified (1)
 109019874 ground (2)
 14476880 low vegetation (3)
 3487218 medium vegetation (4)
 39141518 high vegetation (5)
 165340 building (6)
 13508 rail (10)
 7216 road surface (11)

Kudos to the Scottish government for opening their data. We hereby acknowledge the source of the LiDAR that we have used in the experiments above as “Copyright Scottish Government and SEPA (2014)”.

Points clouds from UAVs have become a common sight. Cheap consumer drones equipped with cameras produce points from images with increasing quality as photogrammetry software is improving. But vegetation is always a show stopper for point clouds generated from imagery data. Only an active sensing technique such as laser scanning can penetrate through the vegetation and generate points on the ground under the canopy of a forested area. Advances in UAV technology and the miniaturization of LiDAR systems have allowed lasers-scanning solutions for drones to enter the market.

Last summer we attended the LiDAR for Drone 2017 Conference by YellowScan and processed some data sets flown with their Surveyor system that is built around the Velodyne VLP-16 Puck LiDAR scanner and the Applanix APX15 single board GNSS-Inertial solution. One common challenge observed in LiDAR data generated by the Velodyne Puck is that surfaces are not as “crisp” as those generated by other laser scanners. Flat and open terrain surfaces are described by a layer of points with a “thickness” of a few centimeter as you can see in the images below. This visualization uses a 10 meter by 5 meter cut-out of from this data set with the coordinate range [774280,774290) in x and [6279463,6279468) in y. Standard ground classification routines will “latch onto” the lowermost envelope of these thick point layers and therefore produce a sub-optimal Digital Terrain Model (DTM).

In part this “thickness” can be reduced by using fewer flightlines as the “thickness” of each flightline by itself is lower but it is compounded when merging all flightlines together. However, deciding which (subset of) flightlines to use for which part of the scene to generate the best possible ground model is not an obvious tasks either and even per flightline there will be a remaining “thickness” to deal with as can be seen in the following set of images.

In the following we show how to deal with “thickness” in a layer of points describing a ground surface. We first produce a “lowest ground” which we then widen into a “thick ground” from which we then derive “median ground” points that create a plausible terrain representation when interpolated by a Delaunay triangulation and rasterized onto a DTM. Step by step we process this example data set captured in a “live demo” during the LiDAR for Drone 2017 Conference – the beautiful Château de Flaugergues in Montpellier, France where the event took place. You can download this data via this link if you would like to repeat these processing steps:

• six raw UAV flight strips above Flaugergues (261 MB)

Once you decompress the RAR file (e.g. with the UnRar.exe freeware) you will find six raw flight strips in LAS format and the trajectory of the UAV in ASCII text format as it was provided by YellowScan.

E:\LAStools\bin>dir Flaugergues
06/27/2017 08:03 PM 146,503,985 Flaugergues_test_demo_ppk_L1.las
06/27/2017 08:02 PM  91,503,103 Flaugergues_test_demo_ppk_L2.las
06/27/2017 08:03 PM 131,917,917 Flaugergues_test_demo_ppk_L3.las
06/27/2017 08:03 PM 219,736,585 Flaugergues_test_demo_ppk_L4.las
06/27/2017 08:02 PM 107,705,667 Flaugergues_test_demo_ppk_L5.las
06/27/2017 08:02 PM  74,373,053 Flaugergues_test_demo_ppk_L6.las
06/27/2017 08:03 PM   7,263,670 Flaugergues_test_demo_ppk_traj.txt

As usually we start with quality checking by visual inspection with lasview and by creating a textual report with lasinfo.

E:\LAStools\bin>lasview Flaugergues_test_demo_ppk_L1.las

The raw LAS file “Flaugergues_test_demo_ppk_L1.las” colored by elevation.

E:\LAStools\bin>lasinfo Flaugergues_test_demo_ppk_L1.las
lasinfo (171011) report for Flaugergues_test_demo_ppk_L1.las
reporting all LAS header entries:
 file signature: 'LASF'
 file source ID: 1
 global_encoding: 1
 project ID GUID data 1-4: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000
 version major.minor: 1.2
 system identifier: 'YellowScan Surveyor'
 generating software: 'YellowReader by YellowScan'
 file creation day/year: 178/2017
 header size: 227
 offset to point data: 297
 number var. length records: 1
 point data format: 3
 point data record length: 34
 number of point records: 4308932
 number of points by return: 4142444 166488 0 0 0
 scale factor x y z: 0.001 0.001 0.001
 offset x y z: 774282 6279505 92
 min x y z: 774152.637 6279377.623 82.673
 max x y z: 774408.344 6279541.646 116.656
variable length header record 1 of 1:
 reserved 0
 user ID 'LASF_Projection'
 record ID 34735
 length after header 16
 description ''
 GeoKeyDirectoryTag version 1.1.0 number of keys 1
 key 3072 tiff_tag_location 0 count 1 value_offset 2154 - ProjectedCSTypeGeoKey: RGF93 / Lambert-93
reporting minimum and maximum for all LAS point record entries ...
 X -129363 126344
 Y -127377 36646
 Z -9327 24656
 intensity 0 65278
 return_number 1 2
 number_of_returns 1 2
 edge_of_flight_line 0 0
 scan_direction_flag 0 0
 classification 0 0
 scan_angle_rank -120 120
 user_data 75 105
 point_source_ID 1 1
 gps_time 219873.160527 219908.550379
 Color R 0 0
 G 0 0
 B 0 0
number of first returns: 4142444
number of intermediate returns: 0
number of last returns: 4142444
number of single returns: 3975956
overview over number of returns of given pulse: 3975956 332976 0 0 0 0 0
histogram of classification of points:
 4308932 never classified (0)

Nicely visible are the circular scanning patterns of the Velodyne VLP-16 Puck. We also notice that the trajectory of the UAV can be seen in the lasview visualization because the Puck was scanning the drone’s own landing gear. The lasinfo report tells us that point coordinates are stored with too much resolution (mm) and that points do not need to be stored using point type 3 (with RGB colors) because all RGB values are zero. We fix this with an initial run of las2las and also compress the raw strips to the LAZ format on 4 CPUs in parallel.

las2las -i Flaugergues\*.las ^
        -rescale 0.01 0.01 0.01 ^
        -auto_reoffset ^
        -set_point_type 1 ^
        -odir Flaugergues\strips_raw -olaz ^
        -cores 4

Next we do the usual check for flightline alignment with lasoverlap (README) which we consider to be by far the most important quality check. We compare the lowest elevation from different flightline per 25 cm by 25cm cell in all overlap areas. We consider a vertical difference of up to 5 cm as acceptable (color coded as white) and mark differences of over 30 cm (color coded as saturated red or blue).

lasoverlap -i Flaugergues\strips_raw\*.laz -faf ^
           -step 0.25 ^
           -min_diff 0.05 -max_diff 0.3 ^
           -odir Flaugergues\quality -o overlap.png

The vertical difference in open areas between the flightlines is slightly above 5 cm which we consider acceptable in this example. Depending on the application we recommend to investigate further where these differences come from and what consequences they may have for post processing. We also create a color-coded visualization of the last return density per 25 cm by 25 cm cell using lasgrid (README) with blue meaning less than 100 returns per square meter and red meaning more than 4000 returns per square meter.

lasgrid -i Flaugergues\strips_raw\*.laz -merged ^
        -keep_last ^
        -step 0.25 ^
        -point_density ^
        -false -set_min_max 100 4000 ^
        -odir Flaugergues\quality -o density_100_4000.png

Color coded density of last returns per square meter for each 25 cm by 25 cm cell. Blue means 100 or less last returns per square meter. Red means 4000 or more last returns per square meter

As usual we start the LiDAR processing by reorganizing the flightlines into square tiles. Because of the variability in the density that is evident in the visualization above we use lastile (README) to create an adaptive tiling that starts with 200 m by 200 m tiles and then iterate to refine those tiles with over 10 million points down to smaller 25 m by 25 m tiles.

lastile -i Flaugergues\strips_raw\*.laz ^
        -apply_file_source_ID ^
        -tile_size 200 -buffer 8 -flag_as_withheld ^
        -refine_tiling 10000000 ^
        -odir Flaugergues\tiles_raw -o flauge.laz

lastile -i Flaugergues\tiles_raw\flauge*_200.laz ^
        -refine_tiles 10000000 ^
        -olaz ^
        -cores 4

lastile -i Flaugergues\tiles_raw\flauge*_100.laz ^
        -refine_tiles 10000000 ^
        -olaz ^
        -cores 4

lastile -i Flaugergues\tiles_raw\flauge*_50.laz ^
        -refine_tiles 10000000 ^
        -olaz ^
        -cores 4

Subsequent processing is faster when the points have a spatially coherent order. Therefore we rearrange the points into standard space-filling z-order using a call to lassort (README). We run this in parallel on as many cores as it makes sense (i.e. not using more cores than there are physical CPUs).

lassort -i Flaugergues\tiles_raw\flauge*.laz ^
        -odir Flaugergues\tiles_sorted -olaz ^
        -cores 4

Next we classify those points as noise that are isolated on a 3D grid of 1 meter cell size using lasnoise. See the README file of lasnoise for a description on the exact manner in which the isolated points are classified. We do this to eliminate low noise points that would otherwise cause trouble in the subsequent processing.

lasnoise -i Flaugergues\tiles_sorted\flauge*.laz ^
         -step 1 -isolated 5 ^
         -odir Flaugergues\tiles_denoised -olaz ^
         -cores 4

Next we mark the subset of lowest points on a 2D grid of 10 cm cell size with classification code 8 using lasthin (README) while ignoring the noise points with classification code 7 that were marked as noise in the previous step.

lasthin -i Flaugergues\tiles_denoised\flauge*.laz ^
        -ignore_class 7 ^
        -step 0.1 -lowest ^
        -classify_as 8 ^
        -odir Flaugergues\tiles_lowest -olaz ^
        -cores 4

Considering only the resulting points marked with classification 8 we then create a temporary ground classification that we refer to as the “lowest ground”. For this we run lasground (README) with a set of suitable parameters that were found by experimentation on two of the most complex tiles from the center of the survey.

lasground -i Flaugergues\tiles_lowest\flauge*.laz ^
          -ignore_class 0 7 ^
          -step 5 -hyper_fine -bulge 1.5 -spike 0.5 ^
          -odir Flaugergues\tiles_lowest_ground -olaz ^
          -cores 4

We then “thicken” this “lowest ground” by classifying all points that are between 2 cm below and 15 cm above the lowest ground to a temporary classification code 6 using the lasheight (README) tool. Depending on the spread of points in your data set you may want to tighten this range accordingly, for example when processing the flightlines acquired by the Velodyne Puck individually. We picked our range based on the visual experiments with “drop lines” and “rise lines” in the lasview viewer that are shown in images above.

lasheight -i Flaugergues\tiles_lowest_ground\flauge*.laz ^
          -do_not_store_in_user_data ^
          -classify_between -0.02 0.15 6 ^
          -odir Flaugergues\tiles_thick_ground -olaz ^
          -cores 4

The final ground classification is obtained by creating the “median ground” from the “thick ground”. This uses a brand-new option in the lasthin (README) tool of LAStools. The new ‘-percentile 50 10’ option selects the point that is closest to the specified percentile of 50 of all point elevations within a grid cell of a specified size given there are at least 10 points in that cell. The selected point either survives the thinning operation or gets marked with a specified classification code or flag.

lasthin -i Flaugergues\tiles_thick_ground\flauge*.laz ^
        -ignore_class 0 1 7 ^
        -step 0.1 -percentile 50 10 ^
        -classify_as 8 ^
        -odir Flaugergues\tiles_median_ground_10_10cm -olaz ^
        -cores 4

lasthin -i Flaugergues\tiles_median_ground_10_10cm\%NAME%*.laz ^
        -ignore_class 0 1 7 ^
        -step 0.2 -percentile 50 10 ^
        -classify_as 8 ^
        -odir Flaugergues\tiles_median_ground_10_20cm -olaz ^
        -cores 4

lasthin -i Flaugergues\tiles_median_ground_10_20cm\%NAME%*.laz ^
        -ignore_class 0 1 7 ^
        -step 0.4 -percentile 50 10 ^
        -classify_as 8 ^
        -odir Flaugergues\tiles_median_ground_10_40cm -olaz ^
        -cores 4

lasthin -i Flaugergues\tiles_median_ground_10_40cm\flauge*.laz ^
        -ignore_class 0 1 7 ^
        -step 0.8 -percentile 50 10 ^
        -classify_as 8 ^
        -odir Flaugergues\tiles_median_ground_10_80cm -olaz ^
         -cores 4

We now compare a triangulation of the median ground points with a triangulation of the highest and the lowest points per 10 cm by 10 cm cell to demonstrate that – at least in open areas – we really have computed a median ground surface.

Finally we raster the tiles with the las2dem (README) tool onto binary elevation grids in BIL format. Here we make the resolution dependent on the tile size, giving the 25 meter and 50 meter tiles the highest resolution of 10 cm and rasterize the 100 meter and 200 meter tiles at 20 cm and 40 cm respectively.

las2dem -i Flaugergues\tiles_median_ground_10_80cm\*_25.laz ^
        -i Flaugergues\tiles_median_ground_10_80cm\*_50.laz ^
        -keep_class 8 ^
        -step 0.1 -use_tile_bb ^
        -odir Flaugergues\tiles_dtm -obil ^
        -cores 4

las2dem -i Flaugergues\tiles_median_ground_10_80cm\*_100.laz ^
        -keep_class 8 ^
        -step 0.2 -use_tile_bb ^
        -odir Flaugergues\tiles_dtm -obil ^
        -cores 4

las2dem -i Flaugergues\tiles_median_ground_10_80cm\*_200.laz ^
        -keep_class 8 ^
        -step 0.4 -use_tile_bb ^
        -odir Flaugergues\tiles_dtm -obil ^
        -cores 4

Because all LAStools can read BIL files via on the fly conversion from rasters to points we can visually inspect the resulting elevation rasters with the lasview (README) tool. By adding the ‘-faf’ or ‘files_are_flightlines’ argument we treat the BIL files as if they were different flightlines which allows us to assign different color to points from different files to better inspect the transitions between tiles. The ‘-points 10000000’ argument instructs lasview to load up to 10 million points into memory instead of the default 5 million.

lasview -i Flaugergues\tiles_dtm\*.bil -faf ^
        -points 10000000

Final raster tiles in BIL format of three different sizes form seamless DTM.

For visual comparison we also produce a DSM and create hillshades. Note that the workflow for DSM creation shown below produces a “highest DSM” that will always be a few centimeter above the “median DTM”. This will be noticeable only in open areas of the terrain where the DSM and the DTM should coincide and their elevation should be identical.

lasthin -i Flaugergues\tiles_denoised\flauge*.laz ^
        -keep_z_above 110 ^
        -filtered_transform ^
        -set_classification 18 ^
        -ignore_class 7 18 ^
        -step 0.1 -highest ^
        -classify_as 5 ^
        -odir Flaugergues\tiles_highest -olaz ^
        -cores 4

las2dem -i Flaugergues\tiles_highest\*_25.laz ^
        -i Flaugergues\tiles_highest\*_50.laz ^
        -keep_class 5 ^
        -step 0.1 -use_tile_bb ^
        -odir Flaugergues\tiles_dsm -obil ^
        -cores 4

las2dem -i Flaugergues\tiles_highest\*_100.laz ^
        -keep_class 5 ^
        -step 0.2 -use_tile_bb ^
        -odir Flaugergues\tiles_dsm -obil ^
        -cores 4

las2dem -i Flaugergues\tiles_highest\*_200.laz ^
        -keep_class 5 ^
        -step 0.4 -use_tile_bb ^
        -odir Flaugergues\tiles_dsm -obil ^
        -cores 4

We thank YellowScan for challenging us to process their drone LiDAR with LAStools in order to present results at their LiDAR for Drone 2017 Conference and for sharing several example data sets with us, including the one used here.

Chris J. Chandler (recipient of three LASmoons)
School of Geography
University of Nottingham, UNITED KINGDOM

Background:
Wetlands provide a range of important ecosystem services: they store carbon, regulate greenhouse gas emissions, provide flood protection as well as water storage and purification. Preserving these services is critical to achieve sustainable environmental management. Currently, mangrove forests are protected in Mexico, however, fresh water wetland forests, which also have high capacity for storing carbon both in the trees and in the soil, are not protected under present legislation. As a result, coastal wetlands in Mexico are threatened by conversion to grazing areas, drainage for urban development and pollution. Given these threats, there is an urgent need to understand the current state and distribution of wetlands to inform policy and protect the ecosystem services provided by these wetlands.
In this project we will combine field data collection, satellite data (i.e. optical remote sensing, radar and LiDAR remote sensing) and modelling to provide an integrated technology for assessing the value of a range of ecosystem services, tested to proof of concept stage based on carbon storage. The outcome of the project will be a tool for mapping the value of a range of ecosystem services. These maps will be made directly available to local stakeholders including policy makers and land users to inform policy regarding forest protection/legislation and aid development of financial incentives for local communities to protect these services.

Wetland classification in the Chiapas region of Mexico

Goal:
At this stage of the project we have characterized wetlands for three priority areas in Mexico (Pantanos de Centla, La Encrucijada and La Mancha). Next stage is the up scaling of the field data at the three study sites using LiDAR data for producing high quality Canopy Height Model (CHM), which has been of great importance for biomass estimation (Ferraz et al., 2016). A high quality CHM will be achieved using LAStools software.

Data:
+ LiDAR provided by the Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI)
+ average height: 5500 m, mirror angle: +/- 30 degrees, speed: 190 knots
+ collected with Cessna 441, Conquest II system at 1 pts/m².

LAStools processing:
1) create 1000 meter tiles with 35 meter buffer to avoid edge artifacts [lastile]
2) classify point clouds into ground and non-ground [lasground]
3) normalize height of points above the ground [lasheight]
4) create a Digital Terrain and Surface Model (DTM and DSM) [las2dem]
5) generate a spike-free Canopy Height Model (CHM) as described here and here [las2dem]
6) compute various metrics for each plot and the normalized tiles [lascanopy]

References:
Ferraz, A., Saatchi, S., Mallet, C., Jacquemoud S., Gonçalves G., Silva C.A., Soares P., Tomé, M. and Pereira, L. (2016). Airborne Lidar Estimation of Aboveground Forest Biomass in the Absence of Field Inventory. Remote Sensing, 8(8), 653.

Manuel Jurado (recipient of three LASmoons)
Departamento de Ingeniería Topográfica y Cartografía
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, SPAIN

Background:
The availability of LiDAR data is creating a lot of innovative possibilities in different fields of science, education, and other field of interests. One of the areas that has been deeply impacted by LiDAR is cartography and in particular one highly specialized sub-field of cartography in the domain of recreational and professional orienteering running: the production of high-quality maps for orienteering races (Ditz et al., 2014). These are thematic maps with a lot of fine detail which demands many hours of field work for the map maker. In order to reduce the fieldwork, LiDAR data obtained from Airborne Research Australia (ARA) is going to be used in order to obtain DEM and to extract features that must be included in these maps. The data will be filtered and processed with the help of LAStools.

Final map with symbolism typical for use in orienteering running

Goal:
The goal of this project is to extract either point (boulders, mounds), linear (contours, erosion gullies, cliffs) and area features (vegetation density) that should be drawn in a orienteering map derived from high-resolution LiDAR. Different LiDAR derived raster images are being created: 0.5m DTM, vegetation density (J. Ryyppo, 2013), slope, Sky-View factor (Ž. Kokalj et al., 2011), and shaded relief. The area used is in Renmark, South Australia and the produced map is going to be used for the Australian Orienteering Championships 2018.

Sky-View factor of DTM for same area as shown above.

Data:
+ 4 square kilometers of airborne LiDAR data produced by Airborne Research Australia at 18 pulses per square meter using the full waveform scanning LiDAR Q680i-S laser scanner from RIEGL
+ 60 hours of check and validation work in the field

LAStools processing:
1) tile into 500 by 500 meter tiles with 20 meter buffer [lastile]
2) classify isolated points as noise [lasnoise]
3) classify point clouds into ground and non-ground [lasground]
4) create a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) [las2dem]
5) normalize height of points above the ground [lasheight]
6) compute vegetation density metrics [lascanopy]
7) create hillshades of the raster DTMs [blast2dem or GDAL]

References:
Ditz, Robert, Franz Glaner, and Georg Gartner. (2014). “Laser Scanning and Orienteering Maps.” Scientific Journal of Orienteering 19.1.
JRyyppo, Jarkko. (2013). “Karttapullautin vegetation mapping guide”.
Kokalj, Žiga, Zaksek, Klemen, and Oštir, Krištof. (2011). Application of sky-view factor for the visualization of historic landscape features in lidar-derived relief models. Antiquity. 85. 263-273.

Sebastian Kasanmascheff (recipient of three LASmoons)
Forest Inventory and Remote Sensing
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, GERMANY

Background:
Forest inventories are the backbone of forest management in Germany. In most federal forestry administrations in Germany, they are performed every ten years in order to assure that logging activities are sustainable. The process involves trained foresters who visit each stand (i.e. an area where the forest is similar in terms of age structure and tree species) and perform angle count sampling as developed by Walter Bitterlich in 1984. In a second step the annual growth is calculated using yield tables and finally a harvest volume is derived. There are three particular reasons to investigate how remote sensing can be integrated in the current inventory system:

1. The current process does not involve random sampling of the sampling points and thus does not offer any measure of the accuracy of the data.
2. Forest engineers hardly ever rely on the inventory data as a stand-alone basis for logging planning. Most often they rely on intuition alone and on the total volume count that they have to deliver for a wider area every year.
3. In the last ten years, the collection of high-resolution LiDAR data has become more cost-effective and most federal agencies in Germany have access to it.

In order to be able to integrate the available remote-sensing data for forest inventories in Germany, it is important to tell apart different tree species as well as estimate their volumes.

Hesse is one of the most forested federal states in Germany.

Goal:
The goal of this project is to perform an object-based classification of conifer trees in Northern Hesse based on high-resolution LiDAR and multi-spectral orthophotos. The first step is to delineate the tree crowns. The second step is to perform a semi-automated classification using the spectral signature of the different conifer species.

Data:
+ DSM (1m), DTM (1m), DSM (0.2 m) of the study area
+ Stereo images with 0.2 m resolution
+ high-resolution LiDAR data (average 10 points/m²)
+ forest inventory data
+ vector files of the individual forest stands
+ ground control points (field data)
All of this data is provided by the Hessian Forest Agency (HessenForst).

LAStools processing:
1) merge and clip the LAZ files [las2las]
2) classify ground and non-ground points [lasground]
3) remove low and high outliers [lasheight, lasnoise]
4) identify buildings within the study area [lasclassify]
5) create a normalized point cloud [lasheight]
6) create a highest-return canopy height model (CHM) [lasthin, las2dem]
7) create a pit-free (CHM) with the spike-free algorithm [las2dem]

In this tutorial we are removing some “tricky” low noise from LiDAR point clouds in order to produce a high-resolution Digital Terrain Model (DTM). The data was flown above a tropical beach and mangrove area in the Philippines using a VUX-1 UAV based system from RIEGL mounted on a helicopter. The survey was done as a test flight by AB Surveying who have the capacity to fly such missions in the Philippines and who have allowed us to share this data with you for educational purposes. You can download the data (1 GB) here. It covers a popular twin beach knows as “Nacpan” near El Nido in Palawan (that we happen to have visited in 2014).

A typical beach fringed by coconut palms in Palawan, Philippines.

We start our usual quality check with a run of lasinfo. We add the ‘-cd’ switch to compute an average point density and the ‘-histo gps_time 1’ switch to produce a 1 second histogram for the GPS time stamps.

lasinfo -i lalutaya.laz ^
        -cd ^
        -histo gps_time 1 ^
        -odix _info -otxt

You can download the resulting lasinfo report here. It tells us that there are 118,740,310 points of type 3 (with RGB colors) with an average density of 57 last returns per square meter. The point coordinates are in the “PRS92 / Philippines 1” projection with EPSG code 3121 that is based on the “Clarke 1866” ellipsoid.

Datum Transform

We prefer to work in an UTM projection based on the “WGS 1984” ellipsoid, so we will first perform a datum transform based on the seven parameter Helmert transformation – a capacity that was recently added to LAStools. For this we first need a transform to get to geocentric or Earth-Centered Earth-Fixed (ECEF) coordinates on the current “Clarke 1866” ellipsoid, then we apply the Helmert transformation that operates on geocentric coordinates and whose parameters are listed in the TOWGS84 string of EPSG code 3121 to get to geocentric or ECEF coordinates on the “WGS 1984” ellipsoid. Finally we can convert the coordinates to the respective UTM zone. These three calls to las2las accomplish this.

las2las -i lalutaya.laz ^
        -remove_all_vlrs ^
        -epsg 3121 ^
        -target_ecef ^
        -odix _ecef_clark1866 -olaz

las2las -i lalutaya_ecef_clark1866.laz ^
        -transform_helmert -127.62,-67.24,-47.04,-3.068,4.903,1.578,-1.06 ^
        -wgs84 -ecef ^
        -ocut 10 -odix _wgs84 -olaz
 
las2las -i lalutaya_ecef_wgs84.laz ^
        -target_utm auto ^
        -ocut 11 -odix _utm -olaz

In these steps we implicitly reduced the resolution that each coordinate was stored with from quarter-millimeters (i.e. scale factors of 0.00025) to the default of centimeters (i.e. scale factors of 0.01) which should be sufficient for subsequent vegetation analysis. The LAZ files also compress better when coordinates a lower resolution so that the ‘lalutaya_utm.laz’ file is over 200 MB smaller than the original ‘lalutaya.laz’ file. The quantization error this introduces is probably still below the overall scanning error of this helicopter survey.

Flightline Recovery

Playing back the file visually with lasview suggests that it contains more than one flightline. Unfortunately the point source ID field of the file is not properly populated with flightline information. However, when scrutinizing the GPS time stamp histogram in the lasinfo report we can see an occasional gap. We highlight two of these gaps in red between GPS second 540226 and 540272 and GPS second 540497 and 540556 in this excerpt from the lasinfo report:

gps_time histogram with bin size 1
[...]
 bin 540224 has 125768
 bin 540225 has 116372
 bin 540226 has 2707
 bin 540272 has 159429
 bin 540273 has 272049
 bin 540274 has 280237
[...]
 bin 540495 has 187103
 bin 540496 has 180421
 bin 540497 has 126835
 bin 540556 has 228503
 bin 540557 has 275025
 bin 540558 has 273861
[...]

We can use lasplit to recover the original flightlines based on gaps in the continuity of GPS time stamps that are bigger than 10 seconds:

lassplit -i lalutaya_utm.laz ^
         -recover_flightlines_interval 10 ^
         -odir strips_raw -o lalutaya.laz

This operation splits the points into 11 separate flightlines. The points within each flightline are stored in the order that the vendor software – which was RiPROCESS 1.7.2 from RIEGL according to the lasinfo report – had written them to file. We can use lassort to bring them back into the order they were acquired in by sorting first on the GPS time stamp and then on the return number field:

lassort -i strips_raw\*.laz ^
        -gps_time -return_number ^
        -odir strips_sorted -olaz ^
        -cores 4

Now we turn the sorted flightlines into tiles (with buffers !!!) for further processing. We also erase the current classification of the data into ground (2) and medium vegetation (4) as a quick visual inspection with lasview immediately shows that those are not correct:

lastile -i strips_sorted\*.laz ^
        -files_are_flightlines ^
        -set_classification 0 ^
        -tile_size 250 -buffer 30 -flag_as_withheld ^
        -odir tiles_raw -o lalu.laz

Quality Checking

Next comes the standard check of flightline overlap and alignment check with lasoverlap. Once more it become clear why it is so important to have flightline information. Without we may have missed what we are about to notice. We create false color images load into Google Earth to visually assess the situation. We map all absolute differences between flightlines below 5 cm to white and all absolute differences above 30 cm to saturated red (positive) or blue (negative) with a gradual shading from white to red or blue for any differences in between. We also create an overview KML file that lets us quickly see in which tile we can find the points for a particular area of interest with lasboundary.

lasoverlap -i tiles_raw\*.laz ^
           -step 1 -min_diff 0.05 -max_diff 0.30 ^
           -odir quality -opng ^
           -cores 4

lasboundary -i tiles_raw\*.laz ^
            -use_tile_bb -overview -labels ^
            -o quality\overview.kml

The resulting visualizations show (a) that our datum transform to the WGS84 ellipsoid worked because the imagery aligns nicely with Google Earth and (b) that there are several issues in the data that require further scrutiny.

In general the data seems well aligned (most open areas are white) but there are blue and red lines crossing the survey area. With lasview have a closer look at the visible blue lines running along the beach in tile ‘lalu_765000_1252750.laz’ by repeatedly pressing ‘x’ to select a different subset and ‘x’ again to view this subset up close while pressing ‘c’ to color it differently:

lasview -i tiles_raw\lalu_765000_1252750.laz

These lines of erroneous points do not only happen along the beach but also in the middle of and below the vegetation as can be seen below:

Our initial hope was to use the higher than usual intensity of these erroneous points to reclassify them to some classification code that we would them exclude from further processing. Visually we found that a reasonable cut-off value for this tile would be an intensity above 35000:

lasview -i tiles_raw\lalu_765000_1252750.laz ^
        -keep_intensity_above 35000 ^
        -filtered_transform ^
        -set_classification 23

However, while this method seems successful on the tile shown above it fails miserably on others such as ‘lalu_764250_1251500.laz’ where large parts of the beach are very reflective and result in high intensity returns to to the dry white sand:

lasview -i tiles_raw\lalu_764250_1251500.laz ^
        -keep_intensity_above 35000 ^
        -filtered_transform ^
        -set_classification 23

Low Noise Removal

In the following we describe a workflow that can remove the erroneous points below the ground so that we can at least construct a high-quality DTM from the data. This will not, however, remove the erroneous points above the ground so a subsequent vegetation analysis would still be affected. Our approach is based on two obervations (a) the erroneous points affect only a relatively small area and (b) different flightlines have their erroneous points in different areas. The idea is to compute a set of coarser ground points separately for each flightline and – when combining them in the end – to pick higher ground points over lower ones. The combined points should then define a surface that is above the erroneous below-ground points so that we can mark them with lasheight as not to be used for the actual ground classification done thereafter.

The new huge_las_file_extract_ground_points_only.bat example batch script that you can download here does all the work needed to compute a set of coarser ground points for each flightline. Simply edit the file such that the LAStools variable points to your LAStools\bin folder and rename it to end with the *.bat extension. Then run:

huge_las_file_extract_ground_points_only strips_sorted\lalutaya_0000001.laz strips_ground_only\lalutaya_0000001.laz
huge_las_file_extract_ground_points_only strips_sorted\lalutaya_0000002.laz strips_ground_only\lalutaya_0000001.laz
huge_las_file_extract_ground_points_only strips_sorted\lalutaya_0000003.laz strips_ground_only\lalutaya_0000001.laz
...
huge_las_file_extract_ground_points_only strips_sorted\lalutaya_0000009.laz strips_ground_only\lalutaya_0000009.laz
huge_las_file_extract_ground_points_only strips_sorted\lalutaya_0000010.laz strips_ground_only\lalutaya_0000010.laz
huge_las_file_extract_ground_points_only strips_sorted\lalutaya_0000011.laz strips_ground_only\lalutaya_0000011.laz

The details on how this batch script works – a pretty standard tile-based multi-core processing workflow – are given as comments in this batch script. Now we have a set of individual ground points computed separately for each flightline and some will include erroneous points below the ground that the lasground algorithm by its very nature is likely to latch on to as you can see here:

The trick is now to utilize the redundancy of multiple scans per area and – when combining flightlines – to pick higher rather than lower ground points in overlap areas by using the ground point closest to the 75th elevation percentile per 2 meter by 2 meter area with at least 3 or more points with lasthin:

lasthin -i strips_ground_only\*.laz -merged ^
        -step 2 -percentile 75 3 ^
        -o lalutaya_ground_only_2m_75_3.laz

There are still some non-ground points in the result as ground-classifying of flightlines individually often results in vegetation returns being included in sparse areas along the edges of the flight lines but we can easily get rid of those:

lasground_new -i lalutaya__ground_only_2m_75_3.laz ^
              -town -hyper_fine ^
              -odix _g -olaz

We sort the remaining ground points into a space-filling curve order with lassort and spatially index them with lasindex so they can be efficiently accessed by lasheight in the next step.

lassort -i lalutaya__ground_only_2m_75_3_g.laz ^
        -keep_class 2 ^
        -o lalutaya_ground.laz

lasindex -i lalutaya_ground.laz

Finally we have the means to robustly remove the erroneous points below the ground from all tiles. We use lasheight with the ground points we’ve just so painstakingly computed to classify all points 20 cm or more below the ground surface they define into classification code 23. Later we simply can ignore this classification code during processing:

lasheight -i tiles_raw\*.laz ^
          -ground_points lalutaya_ground.laz ^
          -do_not_store_in_user_data ^
          -classify_below -0.2 23 ^
          -odir tiles_cleaned -olaz ^
          -cores 4

Rather than trying to ground classify all remaining points we run lasground on a thinned subset of all points. For this we mark the lowest point in every 20 cm by 20 cm grid cell with some temporary classification code such as 6.

lasthin -i tiles_cleaned\*.laz ^
        -ignore_class 23 ^
        -step 0.20 -lowest -classify_as 6 ^
        -odir tiles_thinned -olaz ^
        -cores 4

Finally we can run lasground to compute the ground classification considering all points with classification code 6 by ignoring all points with classification codes 23 and 0.

lasground_new -i tiles_thinned\*.laz ^
              -ignore_class 23 0 ^
              -city -hyper_fine ^
              -odir tiles_ground_new -olaz ^
              -cores 4

And finally we can create a DTM with a resolution of 25 cm using las2dem and the result is truly beautiful:

las2dem -i tiles_ground_new\*.laz ^
        -keep_class 2 ^
        -step 0.25 -use_tile_bb ^
        -odir tiles_dtm_25cm -obil ^
        -cores 4

We have to admit that a few bumps are left (see mouse cursor below) but adjusting the parameters presented here is left as an exercise to the reader.

We would again like to acknowledge AB Surveying whose generosity has made this blog article possible. They have the capacity to fly such missions in the Philippines and who have allowed us to share this data with you for educational purposes.

Last December we had a chance to visit the team of Dr. Stefan Hrabar at CSIRO in Pullenvale near Brisbane who work on a drone LiDAR system called Hovermap. This SLAM-based system is mainly developed for the purpose of autonomous flight and exploration of GPS-denied environments such as buildings, mines and tunnels. But as the SLAM algorithm continuously self-registers the scan lines it produces a LiDAR point cloud that in itself is a nice product. We started our visit with a short test flight around the on-site tower. You can download the LiDAR data and the drone trajectory of this little survey here:

• the LiDAR data
• the drone trajectory

The Hovermap system is based on the Velodyne Puck Lite (VLP-16) that is much cheaper and more light-weight than many other LiDAR systems. One interesting tidbit in the Hovermap setup is that the scanner is installed such that the entire Puck is constantly rotating as you can see in this video. But  the Velodyne Puck is also known to produce somewhat “fluffy” surfaces with a thickness of a few centimeters. In a previous blog post with data from the YellowScan Surveyor system (that is also based on the Puck) we used a “median ground” surface to deal with the “fluff”. In the following we will have a look at the LiDAR data produced by Hovermap and how to process it with LAStools.

LiDAR data of CSIRO tower acquired during test flight of Hovermap system.

As always we start with a lasinfo report that computes the average density ‘-cd’ and histograms for the intensity and the GPS time:

lasinfo -i CSIRO_Tower\results.laz ^
        -cd ^
        -histo intensity 16 -histo gps_time 2 ^
        -odir CSIRO_Tower\quality -odix _info -otxt

A few excerpts of the resulting lasinfo report that you can download here are below:

lasinfo (180409) report for 'CSIRO_Tower\results.laz'
[...]
 number of point records: 16668904
 number of points by return: 0 0 0 0 0
 scale factor x y z: 0.0001 0.0001 0.0001
 offset x y z: -5.919576153930379 22.785394470724583 9.535698734939086
 min x y z: -138.6437 -125.2552 -34.1510
 max x y z: 126.8046 170.8260 53.2224
WARNING: full resolution of min_x not compatible with x_offset and x_scale_factor: -138.64370561381907
WARNING: full resolution of min_y not compatible with y_offset and y_scale_factor: -125.25518631070418
WARNING: full resolution of min_z not compatible with z_offset and z_scale_factor: -34.150966206894068
WARNING: full resolution of max_x not compatible with x_offset and x_scale_factor: 126.80455330595831
WARNING: full resolution of max_y not compatible with y_offset and y_scale_factor: 170.82597525215334
WARNING: full resolution of max_z not compatible with z_offset and z_scale_factor: -34.150966206894068
[...]
 gps_time 121.288045 302.983110
WARNING: 2 points outside of header bounding box
[...]
covered area in square units/kilounits: 51576/0.05
point density: all returns 323.19 last only 318.40 (per square units)
 spacing: all returns 0.06 last only 0.06 (in units)
WARNING: for return 1 real number of points by return is 16424496 but header entry was not set.
WARNING: for return 2 real number of points by return is 244408 but header entry was not set.
[...]
real max z larger than header max z by 0.000035
real min z smaller than header min z by 0.000035
[...]

Most of these warnings have to do with poorly chosen offset values in the LAS header that have many decimal digits instead of being nice round numbers. The points are stored with sub-millimeter resolution (scale factors of 0.0001) which is unnecessarily precise for a UAV flying a Velodyne Puck where the overall system error can be expected to be on the order of a few centimeters. Also the histogram of return numbers in the LAS header was not populated. We can fix these issues with one call to las2las:

las2las -i CSIRO_Tower\results.laz ^
        -rescale 0.01 0.01 0.01 ^
        -auto_reoffset ^
        -odix _fixed -olaz

If you create another lasinfo report on the fixed file you will see that all the warnings have gone. The file size is now also only 102 MB instead of 142 MB because centimeter coordinate compress much better than sub-millimeter coordinates.

The average density of 318 last return per square meter reported by lasinfo is not that useful for a UAV survey because it does account for the highly varying distribution of LiDAR returns in the area surveyed. With lasgrid we can get a much more clear picture of that.

lasgrid -i CSIRO_Tower\results_fixed.laz ^
        -last_only ^
        -step 0.5 -use_bb -density ^
        -false -set_min_max 0 1500 ^
        -o CSIRO_Tower\quality\density_0_1500.png

LiDAR density: blue is close to zero and red is 1500 or more last returns / sqr mtr

The red dot in the point density indicated an area with over 1500 last returns per square meter. No surprise that this is the take-off and touch-down location of the copter drone. Naturally this spot is completely over-scanned compared to the rest of the area. We can remove these points with the help of the timestamps by cutting off the start and the end of the recording.

The total recording time including take-off, flight around the tower, and touch-down was around 180 seconds or 3 minutes as the lasinfo report tells us. Note that the recorded time stamps are neither “GPS Week Time” nor “Adjusted Standard GPS Time” but an internal system time. By visualizing the trajectory of the UAV with lasview while binning the timestamps into the intensity field we can easily determine what interval of timestamps describes the actual survey flight. First we convert the drone trajectory from the textual ASCII format to the LAZ format with txt2las:

txt2las -i CSIRO_Tower\results_traj.txt ^
        -skip 1 ^
        -parse txyz ^
        -set_classification 12 ^
        -olaz

lasview -i CSIRO_Tower\results_traj.laz ^
        -bin_gps_time_into_intensity 1

Binning timestamps into intensity allows visually determining start and end of survey.

Using lasview and pressing <i> while hovering over those points of the trajectory that appear to be the survey start and end we determine visually that the timestamps between 164 to 264 correspond to the actual survey flight over the area of interest with the take-off and touch-down maneuvers excluded. We use las2las to cut out the relevant part and re-run lasgrid:

las2las -i CSIRO_Tower\results_fixed.laz ^
        -keep_gps_time 164 264 ^
        -o CSIRO_Tower\results_survey.laz

lasgrid -i CSIRO_Tower\results_survey.laz ^
        -last_only ^
        -step 0.5 -use_bb -density ^
        -false -set_min_max 0 1500 ^
        -o CSIRO_Tower\quality\density_0_1500_survey.png

LiDAR density after removing take-off and touch-down maneuvers.

The other set of point we are less interested in are those occasional hits far from the scanner that sample the area too sparsely to be useful for anything. We use lastrack to reclassify points as noise (7) that exceed a x/y distance of 50 meters from the trajectory and then use lasgrid to create another density image without the points classified as noise..

lastrack -i CSIRO_Tower\results_survey.laz ^
         -track CSIRO_Tower\results_traj.laz ^
         -classify_xy_range_between 50 1000 7 ^
         -o CSIRO_Tower\results_xy50.laz

lasgrid -i CSIRO_Tower\results_xy50.laz ^
        -last_only -keep_class 0 ^
        -step 0.5 -use_bb -density ^
        -false -set_min_max 0 1500 ^
        -o CSIRO_Tower\quality\density_0_1500_xy50.png

LiDAR density after removing returns farther than 50 m from trajectory.

We process the remaining points using a typical tile-based processing pipeline. First we run lastile to create tiling of 200 meter by 200 meter tiles with 20 buffers while dropping the noise points::

lastile -i CSIRO_Tower\results_xy50.laz ^
        -drop_class 7 ^
        -tile_size 200 -buffer 20 -flag_as_withheld ^
        -odir CSIRO_Tower\tiles_raw -o eta.laz

Because of the high sampling we expect there to be quite a few duplicate point where all three coordinate x, y, and z are identical. We remove them with a call to lasduplicate:

lasduplicate -i CSIRO_Tower\tiles_raw\*.laz ^
             -unique_xyz ^
             -odir CSIRO_Tower\tiles_unique -olaz ^
             -cores 4

This removes between 12 to 25 thousand point from each tile. Then we use lasnoise to classify isolated points as noise:

lasnoise -i CSIRO_Tower\tiles_unique\*.laz ^
         -step_xy 0.5 -step_z 0.1 -isolated 5 ^
         -odir CSIRO_Tower\tiles_denoised_temp -olaz ^
         -cores 4

Aggressive parameters assure most noise point below ground are found.

This classifies between 13 to 23 thousand point from each tile into the noise classification code 7. We use rather aggressive settings to make sure we get most of the noise points that are below the terrain. Getting a correct ground classification in the next few steps is the main concern now even if this means that many points above the terrain on wires, towers, or vegetation will also get miss-classified as noise (at least temporarily). Next we use lasthin to classify a subset of points with classification code 8 on which we will then run the ground classification. We classify each point that is closest to the 5th percentile in elevation per 25 cm by 25 cm grid cell given there are at least 20 non-noise points in a cell. We then repeat this while increasing the cell size to 50 cm by 50 cm and 100 cm by 100 cm.

lasthin -i CSIRO_Tower\tiles_denoised_temp\*.laz ^
        -ignore_class 7 ^
        -step 0.25 -percentile 5 20 -classify_as 8 ^
        -odir CSIRO_Tower\tiles_thinned_025 -olaz ^
        -cores 4

lasthin -i CSIRO_Tower\tiles_thinned_025\*.laz ^
        -ignore_class 7 ^
        -step 0.50 -percentile 5 20 -classify_as 8 ^
        -odir CSIRO_Tower\tiles_thinned_050 -olaz ^
        -cores 4

lasthin -i CSIRO_Tower\tiles_thinned_025\*.laz ^
        -ignore_class 7 ^
        -step 1.00 -percentile 5 20 -classify_as 8 ^
        -odir CSIRO_Tower\tiles_thinned_100 -olaz ^
        -cores 4

Then we ground classify the points that were classified into the temporary classification code 8 in the previous step using lasground.

lasground -i CSIRO_Tower\tiles_thinned_100\*.laz ^
          -ignore_class 7 0 ^
          -town -ultra_fine ^
          -odir CSIRO_Tower\tiles_ground -olaz ^
          -cores 4

The resulting ground points are a lower envelope of the “fluffy” sampled surfaces produced by the Velodyne Puck scanner. We use lasheight to thicken the ground by moving all points between 1 cm below and 6 cm above the TIN of these “low ground” points to a temporary classification code 6 representing a “thick ground”. We also undo the overly aggressive noise classifications above the ground by setting all higher points back to classification code 1 (unclassified).

lasheight -i CSIRO_Tower\tiles_ground\*.laz ^
          -classify_between -0.01 0.06 6 ^
          -classify_above 0.06 1 ^
          -odir CSIRO_Tower\tiles_ground_thick -olaz ^
          -cores 4

Profile view for 25 centimeter wide strip of open terrain. Top: Green points are low ground. Orange points are thickened ground with 5 cm drop lines. Middle: Brown points are median ground computed from thick ground. Bottom: Comparing low ground points (in green) with median ground points (in brown).

From the “thick ground” we then compute a “median ground” using lasthin in a similar fashion as we used it before. A profile view for a 25 centimeter wide strip of open terrain illustrates the workflow of going from “low ground” via “thick ground” to “median ground” and shows the slight difference in elevation between the two.

lasthin -i CSIRO_Tower\tiles_ground_thick\*.laz ^
        -ignore_class 0 1 7 ^
        -step 0.25 -percentile 50 10 -classify_as 2 ^
        -odir CSIRO_Tower\tiles_ground_median_025 -olaz ^
        -cores 4

lasthin -i CSIRO_Tower\tiles_ground_median_025\*.laz ^
        -ignore_class 0 1 7 ^
        -step 0.50 -percentile 50 10 -classify_as 2 ^
        -odir CSIRO_Tower\tiles_ground_median_050 -olaz ^
        -cores 4

lasthin -i CSIRO_Tower\tiles_ground_median_050\*.laz ^
        -ignore_class 0 1 7 ^
        -step 1.00 -percentile 50 10 -classify_as 2 ^
        -odir CSIRO_Tower\tiles_ground_median_100 -olaz ^
        -cores 4

Then we use lasnoise once more with more conservative settings to remove the noise points that are sprinkled around the scene.

lasnoise -i CSIRO_Tower\tiles_ground_median_100\*.laz ^
         -step_xy 1.0 -step_z 1.0 -isolated 5 ^
         -odir CSIRO_Tower\tiles_denoised -olaz ^
         -cores 4

While we classify the scene into building roofs, vegetation, and everything else with lasclassify we also move all (unused) classifications to classification code 1 (unclassified). You may play with the parameters of lasclassify (see README) to achieve better a building classification. However, those buildings the laser can peek into (either via a window or because they are gazebo-like structures) will not be classified correctly. unless you remove the points that are under the roof somehow.

lasclassify -i CSIRO_Tower\tiles_denoised\*.laz ^
            -ignore_class 7 ^
            -change_classification_from_to 0 1 ^
            -change_classification_from_to 6 1 ^
            -step 1 ^
            -odir CSIRO_Tower\tiles_classified -olaz ^
            -cores 4

A glimpse at the final classification result is below. A hillshaded DTM and a strip of classified points. Of course the tower was miss-classified as vegetation given that it looks just like a tree to the logic used in lasclassify.

The hillshaded DTM with a strip of classified points.

Finally we remove the tile buffers (that were really important for tile-based processing) with lastile:

lastile -i CSIRO_Tower\tiles_classified\*.laz ^
        -remove_buffer ^
        -odir CSIRO_Tower\tiles_final -olaz ^
        -cores 4

And publish the LiDAR point cloud as version 1.6 of Potree using laspublish:

laspublish -i CSIRO_Tower\tiles_final\*.laz ^
           -i CSIRO_Tower\results_traj.laz ^
           -only_3D -elevation -overwrite -potree16 ^
           -title "CSIRO Tower" ^
           -description "HoverMap test flight, 18 Dec 2017" ^
           -odir CSIRO_Tower\tiles_portal -o portal.html -olaz

Note that we also added the trajectory of the drone because it looks nice and gives a nice illustration of how the UAV was scanning the scene.

Via Potree we can publish and explore the final point cloud using any modern Web browser.

We would like to thank the entire team around Dr. Stefan Hrabar for taking time out of their busy schedules just a few days before Christmas.

Martin Buchauer (recipient of three LASmoons)
Cartography & Geomedia Technology
University of Applied Science Munich, GERMANY

Background:
Salt marsh areas provide numerous services such as natural flood defenses, carbon sequestration, agricultural services, and are a valuable coastal habitat for flora, fauna and humans. However, they are not only threatened by the constant rise of sea levels caused by global warming but also by human settlement in coastal areas. A sensible local coastal development is important as it may help to support the development and progression of stressed salt marshes.

Looking South you can see the salt marsh area next to a famous golf course with St Andrews in the background.

Goal:

This research aims to visualize and extract vegetation metrics as well as the temporal analysis of four salt marsh data sets which are derived from terrestrial laser scanning. Located at the South and North shore of the Eden Estuary near St Andrews, Scotland, the scans were acquired in the summer and winter of 2016. Ground based laser scanning is an ideal method of fully reconstructing vegetation structures as well as having the ability to retrieve meaningful metrics such as height, area, and vegetation density. Although this technology has frequently been applied in the area of forestry, its application to salt marsh areas has not yet fully explored.

Data:
+ TLS data acquired with a Leica HDS6100 (average density of 38000 points/m²)
+ ground control points (field data)

LAStools processing:
1) check the quality of the LiDAR data [lasinfo, lasoverlap, lasgrid]
2) merge and retile the original data with buffers [lastile]
3) classify point clouds into ground and non-ground [lasthin, lasground]
4) create digital terrain (DTM) and digital surface models (DSM) [lasthin, las2dem, blast2dem]

Three videos from a full day workshop on LiDAR processing at the Department of Earth and Space Sciences of the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India held in October 2017 that was organized by Dr. A. M. Ramiya who we thank very much for the invitation and for being such a kind host. After our usual introduction to LiDAR and LAStools we use three raw flightlines from Ayutthaya, Thailand as example data to perform a complete LiDAR workflow including

1. LiDAR quality checking such as pulse density, coverage, and flightline alignment
2. LiDAR preparation (compressing, tiling, denoising, classifying)
3. LiDAR derivative creation (DTM and DSM rasters, contours, building and vegetation footprints)

You can download the three flightlines used in the tutorial here (line2, line3, line4) to follow along.

morning video

after lunch video

after tea video

The folks from Harris Aerial gave us LiDAR data from a test-flight of one of their drones, the Carrier H4 Hybrid HE (with a 5kg maximum payload and a retail price of US$ 28,000), carrying a Snoopy A series LiDAR system from LidarUSA in the countryside near Huntsville, Alabama. The laser scanner used by the Snoopy A series is a Velodyne HDL 32E that has 32 different laser/detector pairs that fire in succession to scan up to 700,000 points per second within a range of 1 to 70 meters. You can download the raw LiDAR file from the 80 second test flight here. As always, the first thing we do is to visualize the file with lasview and to generate a textual report of its contents with lasinfo.

lasview -i Velodyne001.laz -set_min_max 680 750

It becomes obvious that the drone must have scanned parts of itself (probably the landing gear) during the flight and we exploit this fact in the later processing. The information which of the 32 lasers was collecting which point is stored into the ‘point source ID’ field which is usually used for the flightline information. This results in a psychedelic look in lasview as those 32 different numbers get mapped to the 8 different colors that lasview uses for distinguishing flightlines.

The lasinfo report we generate computes the average point density with ‘-cd’ and includes histograms for a number of point attributes, namely for ‘user data’, ‘intensity’, ‘point source ID’, ‘GPS time’, and ‘scan angle rank’.

lasinfo -i Velodyne001.laz ^
        -cd ^
        -histo user_data 1 ^
        -histo point_source 1 ^
        -histo intensity 16 ^
        -histo gps_time 1 ^
        -histo scan_angle_rank 5 ^
        -odir quality -odix _info -otxt

You can download the resulting report here and it will tell you that the information which of the 32 lasers was collecting which point was stored both into the ‘user data’ field and into the ‘point source ID’ field. The warnings you see below have to do with the fact that the double-precision bounding box stored in the LAS header was populated with numbers that have many more decimal digits than the coordinates in the file, which only have millimeter (or millifeet) resolution as all three scale factors are 0.001 (meaning three decimal digits).

WARNING: stored resolution of min_x not compatible with x_offset and x_scale_factor: 2171988.6475160527
WARNING: stored resolution of min_y not compatible with y_offset and y_scale_factor: 1622812.606925504
WARNING: stored resolution of min_z not compatible with z_offset and z_scale_factor: 666.63504345017589
WARNING: stored resolution of max_x not compatible with x_offset and x_scale_factor: 2172938.973065129
WARNING: stored resolution of max_y not compatible with y_offset and y_scale_factor: 1623607.5209975131
WARNING: stored resolution of max_z not compatible with z_offset and z_scale_factor: 1053.092674726669

Both the “return number” and the “number of returns” attribute of every points in the file is 2. This makes it appear as if the file would only contain the last returns of those laser shots that produced two returns. However, as the Velodyne HDL 32E only produces one return per shot we can safely conclude that those numbers should all be 1 instead of 2 and that this is just a small bug in the export software. We can easily fix this with las2las.

reporting minimum and maximum for all LAS point record entries ...
[...]
 return_number 2 2
 number_of_returns 2 2
[...]

The lasinfo report lacks information about the coordinate reference system as there is no VLR that stores projection information. Harris Aerial could not help us other than telling us that the scan was near Huntsville, Alamaba. Measuring certain distances in the scene like the height of the house or the tree suggests that both horizontal and vertical units are in feet, or rather in US survey feet. After some experimenting we find that using EPSG 26930 for NAD83 Alabama West but forcing the default horizontal units from meters to US survey feet gives a result that aligns well with high-resolution Google Earth imagery as you can see below:

lasgrid -i flightline1.laz ^
        -i flightline2.laz ^
        -merged ^
        -epsg 26930 -survey_feet ^
        -step 1 -highest ^
        -false -set_min_max 680 750 ^
        -o testing26930usft.png

Using EPSG code 26930 but with US survey feet instead of meters results in nice alignment with GE imagery.

We use the fact that the drone has scanned itself to extract an (approximate) trajectory by isolating those LiDAR returns that have hit the drone. Via a visual check with lasview (by hovering with the cursor over the lowest drone hits and pressing hotkey ‘i’) we determine that the lowest drone hits are all above 719 feet. We use two calls to las2las to split the point cloud vertically. In the same call we also change the resolution from three to two decimal digits, fix the return number issue, and add the missing geo-referencing information:

las2las -i Velodyne001.laz ^
        -rescale 0.01 0.01 0.01 ^
        -epsg 26930 -survey_feet -elevation_survey_feet ^
        -set_return_number 1 ^
        -set_number_of_returns 1 ^
        -keep_z_above 719 ^
        -odix _above719 -olaz

las2las -i Velodyne001.laz ^
        -rescale 0.01 0.01 0.01 ^
        -epsg 26930 -survey_feet -elevation_survey_feet ^
        -set_return_number 1 ^
        -set_number_of_returns 1 ^
        -keep_z_below 719 ^
        -odix _below719 -olaz

We then use the manual editing capabilities of lasview to change the classifications of the LiDAR points that correspond to drone hits from 1 to 12, which is illustrated by the series of screen shots below.

lasview -i Velodyne001_above719.laz

The workflow illustrated above results in a tiny LAY file that is part of the LASlayers functionality of LAStools. It only encodes the few changes in classifications that we’ve made to the LAZ file without re-writing those parts that have not changed. Those interested may use laslayers to inspect the structure of the LAY file:

laslayers -i Velodyne001_above719.laz

We can apply the LAY file on-the-fly with the ‘-ilay’ option, for example, when running lasview:

lasview -i Velodyne001_above719.laz -ilay

To separate the drone-hit trajectory from the remaining points we run lassplit with the ‘-ilay’ option and request to split by classification with this command line:

lassplit -i Velodyne001_above719.laz -ilay ^
         -by_classification -digits 3 ^
         -olaz

This gives us two new files with the three-digit appendices ‘_001’ and ‘_012’. The latter one contains those points we marked as being part of the trajectory. We now want to use lasview to – visually – find a good moment in time where to split the trajectory into multiple flightlines. The lasinfo report tells us that the GPS time stamps are in the range from 418,519 to 418,602. In order to use the same trick as we did in our recent article on processing LiDAR data from the Hovermap Drone, where we mapped the GPS time to the intensity for querying it via lasview, we first need to subtract a large number from the GPS time stamps to bring them into a suitable range that fits the intensity field as done here.

lasview -i Velodyne001_above719_012.laz ^
        -translate_gps_time -418000 ^
        -bin_gps_time_into_intensity 1
        -steps 5000

The ‘-steps 5000’ argument makes for a slower playback (press ‘p’ to repeat) to better follow the trajectory.

Hovering with the mouse over a point that – visually – seems to be one of the turning points of the drone and pressing ‘i’ on the keyboard shows an intensity value of 548 which corresponds to the GPS time stamp 418548, which we then use to split the LiDAR point cloud (without the trajectory) into two flightlines:

las2las -i Velodyne001_below719.laz ^
        -i Velodyne001_above719_001.laz ^
        -merged ^
        -keep_gps_time_below 418548 ^
        -o flightline1.laz

las2las -i Velodyne001_below719.laz ^
        -i Velodyne001_above719_001.laz ^
        -merged ^
        -keep_gps_time_above 418548 ^
        -o flightline2.laz

Next we use lasoverlap to check how well the LiDAR points from the flight out and the flight back align vertically. This tool computes the difference of the lowest points for each square foot covered by both flightlines. Differences of less than a quarter of a foot are mapped to white, differences of more than half a foot are mapped to saturated red or blue depending on whether the difference is positive or negative:

lasoverlap -i flightline1.laz ^
           -i flightline2.laz ^
           -faf ^
           -min_diff 0.25 -max_diff 0.50 -step 1 ^
           -odir quality -o overlap_025_050.png

We then use a new feature of the LAStools GUI (as of version 180429) to closer inspect larger red or blue areas. We want to use lasmerge and clip out any region that looks suspect for closer examination with lasview. We start the tool in the GUI mode with the ‘-gui’ command and the two flightlines pre-loaded. Using the new PNG overlay roll-out on the left we add the ‘overlap_025_050_diff.png’ image from the quality folder created in the last step and clip out three areas.

lasmerge -i flightline1.laz -i flightline2.laz -gui

You can also clip out these three areas using the command lines below:

lasmerge -i flightline1.laz -i flightline2.laz ^
         -faf ^
         -inside 2172500 1623160 2172600 1623165 ^
         -o clip2500_3160_100x005.laz

lasmerge -i flightline1.laz -i flightline2.laz ^
         -faf ^
         -inside 2172450 1623450 2172550 1623455 ^
         -o clip2450_3450_100x005.laz

lasmerge -i flightline1.laz -i flightline2.laz ^
         -faf ^
         -inside 2172430 1623290 2172530 1623310 ^
         -o clip2430_3290_100x020.laz

A closer inspection of the three cut out slices explains the red and blue areas in the difference image created by lasoverlap. We find a small systematic error in two of the slices. In slice ‘clip2500_3160_100x005.laz‘ the green points from flightline 1 are on average slightly higher than the red points from flightline 2. Vice-versa in slice ‘clip2450_3450_100x005.laz‘ the green points from flightline 1 are on average slightly lower than the red points from flightline 2. However, the error is less than half a foot and only happens near the edges of the flightlines. Given that our surfaces are expected to be “fluffy” anyways (as is typical for Velodyne LiDAR systems), we accept these differences and continue processing.

The strong red and blue colors in the center of the difference image created by lasoverlap is easily explained by looking at slice ‘clip2430_3290_100x020.laz‘. The scanner was “looking” under a gazebo-like open roof structure from two different directions and therefore always seeing parts of the floor in one flightline that were obscured by the roof in the other.

While working with this data we’ve also implemented a new feature for lastrack that computes the 3D distance between LiDAR points and the trajectory and allows storing the result as an additional per point attribute with extra bytes. Those can then be visualized with lasgrid. Here an example:

lastrack -i flightline1.laz ^
         -i flightline2.laz ^
         -track Velodyne001_above719_012.laz ^
         -store_xyz_range_as_extra_bytes ^
         -odix _xyz_range -olaz ^
         =cores 2

lasgrid -i flightline*_xyz_range.laz -merged ^
        -drop_attribute_below 0 1 ^
        -attribute0 -lowest ^
        -false -set_min_max 20 200 ^
        -o quality/closest_xyz_range_020ft_200ft.png

lasgrid -i flightline*_xyz_range.laz -merged ^
        -drop_attribute_below 0 1 ^
        -attribute0 -highest ^
        -false -set_min_max 30 300 ^
        -o quality/farthest_xyz_range_030ft_300ft.png

Below the complete processing pipeline for creating a median ground model from the “fluffy” Velodyne LiDAR data that results in the hillshaded DTM shown here. The workflow is similar to those we have developed in earlier blog posts for Velodyne Puck based systems like the Hovermap and the Yellowscan.

Hillshaded DTM with a resolution of 1 foot generated via a median ground computation by the LAStools processing pipeline detailed below.

lastile -i flightline1.laz ^
        -i flightline2.laz ^
        -faf ^
        -tile_size 250 -buffer 25 -flag_as_withheld ^
        -odir tiles_raw -o somer.laz

lasnoise -i tiles_raw\*.laz ^
         -step_xy 2 -step 1 -isolated 9 ^
         -odir tiles_denoised -olaz ^
          -cores 4

lasthin -i tiles_denoised\*.laz ^
        -ignore_class 7 ^
        -step 1 -percentile 0.05 10 -classify_as 8 ^
        -odir tiles_thinned_1_foot -olaz ^
        -cores 4

lasthin -i tiles_thinned_1_foot\*.laz ^
        -ignore_class 7 ^
        -step 2 -percentile 0.05 10 -classify_as 8 ^
        -odir tiles_thinned_2_foot -olaz ^
        -cores 4

lasthin -i tiles_thinned_2_foot\*.laz ^
        -ignore_class 7 ^
        -step 4 -percentile 0.05 10 -classify_as 8 ^
        -odir tiles_thinned_4_foot -olaz ^
        -cores 4

lasthin -i tiles_thinned_4_foot\*.laz ^
        -ignore_class 7 ^
        -step 8 -percentile 0.05 10 -classify_as 8 ^
        -odir tiles_thinned_8_foot -olaz ^
        -cores 4

lasground -i tiles_thinned_8_foot\*.laz ^
          -ignore_class 1 7 ^
          -town -extra_fine ^
          -odir tiles_ground_lowest -olaz ^
          -cores 4

lasheight -i tiles_ground_lowest\*.laz ^
          -classify_between -0.05 0.5 6 ^
          -odir tiles_ground_thick -olaz ^
          -cores 4

lasthin -i tiles_ground_thick\*.laz ^
        -ignore_class 1 7 ^
        -step 1 -percentile 0.5 -classify_as 2 ^
        -odir tiles_ground_median -olaz ^
        -cores 4

las2dem -i tiles_ground_median\*.laz ^
        -keep_class 2 ^
        -step 1 -use_tile_bb ^
        -odir tiles_dtm -obil ^
        -cores 4

blast2dem -i tiles_dtm\*.bil -merged ^
          -step 1 -hillshade ^
          -o dtm_hillshaded.png

We thank Harris Aerial for sharing this LiDAR data set with us flown by their Carrier H4 Hybrid HE drone carrying a Snoopy A series LiDAR system from LidarUSA.