Howard's description of LibPC as "GDALish" reminded me of my "dream in
the drawer" (Italian literal translation of a long-term desire) of
having a "LDAL" (Lidar Data Abstraction Library!? :-) ) to read/process
different formats (LAS - Optech's CDS files, ASCII etc...) with also
support for the upcoming "waveform".
PCL seems very interesting, I'll keep on my toes for LibPC development!
Ciao
Francesco Pirotti
Il 05/03/2011 04:47, Howard Butler ha scritto:
On Mar 4, 2011, at 7:03 PM, Ben Discoe wrote:
Greetings all,
I'm checking out libLAS and just joined the list. We (myself, at my
day job) have been defining our own simple/fast point cloud format, so
i'm checking out libLAS to either avoid reinventing the wheel (if LAS
will suffice) or potentially to add support for our format to libLAS
(if it doesn't :-)
LAS is a simple format, but it has a number of deficiencies depending on the
scenario you plan to use it for. The original intent of the format was data
interchange for hardware sensors, and it has accidentally become the
GeoTIFF/Shapefile of LiDAR because of that.
I would say it's not a particularly good format for driving GUI applications (it is
sequentially organized with no inherent spatial organization) and the fact that the
fields are fixed ends up being a limitation for people wanting to do various things.
It's also quite "fat" because of its fixed field nature, and does compress well
with things like LASzip (http://laszip.org).
Michael Gerlek and I are currently in the middle of bootstrapping something
tentatively called libPC, which is where you'd want to add your own point
cloud-ish format support to. libLAS is expected to focus only on LAS moving
forward (a libLAS 2.0 in some ways, if you will), and some of the various warts
that libLAS has acquired for formats and operations will be moved over there as
libPC is built up. Right now there's only a mailing list and a master
repository.
libPC is expected to be focused more on data interchange, processing, and
transformation (GDAL'ish) than visualization or real-time. If you want
something on that end of the spectrum, I'd look at PCL (Point Cloud Library --
we sure suck at naming things) http://www.ros.org/wiki/pcl I hope that when
libPC grows up, it can optionally fit into PCL as a data provider.
http://hg.liblas.org/pc
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/libpc
I will also note that we expect to have a strong showing for libLAS and libPC
at the OSGeo Montreal Code Sprint in a couple of weeks, which will hopefully
continue the momentum that Michael has been pushing lately.
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Montreal_Code_Sprint_2011
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Montreal_Code_Sprint_2011_Agenda#libLAS
Just some points about the website/documentation that i found right off:
1. On http://liblas.org/download.html, it says:
Current Release(s)
* 2010-02-01
Past Releases
* 2010-1-7
Fixed.
I'm quite certain that these are actually 2011, not 2010.
2. In Getting Started (http://liblas.org/start.html) and also on the
download page (http://liblas.org/download.html) there is a link to
sample data:
http://liblas.org/samples/srs.las
or http://liblas.org/samples/
These links are broken (404).
These are broken right now because something has been constantly pulling the
sample library down and causing me to overrun my bandwidth allotment for
liblas.org. I don't know what a good solution might be. I'm leaning toward
having a landing page that has a login/password that people can use. This will
hopefully allow humans to manually download stuff without the bots going
bananas and sucking up all the bandwidth. I'll try to fix this up this week.
This file can be gotten from the hg repository because it is quite small..
http://hg.liblas.org/main/raw-file/5cd75fb456fa/test/data/srs.las
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*Francesco Pirotti*
Dep. TESAF
CIRGEO -- Interdepartmental Research Center on Cartography Photogrammetry
Remote Sensing and G.I.S.
University of Padova
Web: http://www.cirgeo.unipd.it/cirgeo/francescopirotti.htm
Email: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
Phone: +39 049 827 2710
Phone: +39 349 55 39 261
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