Today I got an email from a LAStools user at NOAA pointing out a new entry in the ArcGIS 10.2 documentation of ESRI that mentions a new *.zlas format. He spends a good portion of time on the ArcGIS resources pages and today was the first time he has seen any mention of this. This may have been an oversight at ESRI since there was no press release, blog post, etc preceding the documentation update (that happened 11 days ago) and googling doesn’t return any results either. A screenshot of the entry can be found below.
I have heard about LAS compression by ESRI since Gene mentioned it in a blog entry after ESRI’s 3D Mapping and LiDAR Forum. Back then I throught they were talking about LAZ support and that the 1.5 years of talking with ESRI about including reading and writing of LASzip-compressed LiDAR into ArcGIS was getting somewhere. But turns out they have been doing their own thing. Here some rumors I have heard about ESRI’s new *.zlas format:
- similar compression rates as LAZ
- includes spatial indexing
- (maybe) re-orders points during compression
- performance is like laszip.exe or better
- will be available in ArcGIS 10.2.1
- can be used without the LAS Dataset
- “free” Windows executable will be available soon
- development libraries with API will follow
- ESRI has been giving data providers a heads up that clients may soon demand this format
My first thought was that this might be a reengineered version of the LizardTech LiDAR CompressorTM but it is not; this seems to be ESRI’s own development. Does anyone have more details on this?
Also, what was their motivation? Is LAZ too slow for them? I would have happily adressed whatever LASzip was lacking as (compatible) extensions to the LAZ format – which has become de-facto standard for LiDAR compression and is open source. But instead they invested serious money and man-power into creating an entirely new format. Anyone want to speculate why …?
screenshot of the ArcGIS 10.2 documentation mentioning *.zlas
