On Nov 19, 2012, at 2:37 AM, Chaitanya kumar CH chaitanya...@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
Can someone tell me the most common data formats useful for storing the LiDAR
data including the LiDAR specific data.
LiDAR industry's GeoTIFF or Shapefile is the ASPRS LAS format, with all the
good and bad connotations of each in terms of specification stewardship,
variability of purported compliant output, and specification complexity.
However, the specification has been quite successful at its stated purpose,
which is to provide an interchange format for airborne LiDAR data. LAS is also
sometimes used for terrestrial and mobile LiDAR, but it can be a somewhat poor
fit in those situations.
LAZ, linked earlier, is an extension of LAS to provide a compressed variant of
the format using arithmetic encoding. The software to read and write LAZ is
provided as a LGPL C++ library, and its use within the industry is increasing
due to the availability of the open source library and the rather bloated
nature of LAS. LAS and LAZ are very much linked in terms of what they provide
as far as format capabilities, however.
There is also the ASTM E57 standard, with its open source implementation
libe57, that provides an alternative to LAS that works with polar, terrestrial,
and mobile data a little bit better than LAS. It does not have wide support
within the industry thus far, and it's unclear as to whether it will ultimately
get the uptake to push it over LAS in terms of volume archival data.
Plain old freeform delimited text still overshadows the LiDAR industry, much
like it did to the raster one a generation or two ago. In my opinion this is
due to the fact that hardware vendors tend to only support the bare minimums
within their export data (such as somewhat naked LAS), and the fact that the
industry's specifications are not rich enough to effectively deal with LiDAR
data such as full waveform characterization with all of the auxiliary
information required to be usable.
Howard
http://pointcloud.org
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