How do we process Lidar Data Today?
Seasons of Change - Seasons of Learning
Recently, I finished my PhD under the supervision of Dr. Nicholas Coops. Now, I am transitioning into post-doctoral role working with the Center for Wildfire Coexistence. I like to say I am crossing the boundary between wildfire recovery into wildfire mitigation and along the way I am completing my disaster cycle.
As a new post-doc I am reminded of my first year as a PhD - it is time to hit the ground and learn again! The last year has focused on ecology and writing. Now, I am turning back and brushing up on some of my more tecnical roots. Two of the technical subjects I am focusing on are wildfire hazard modeling and lidar data processing. The world of lidar processing has rapidly advanced and I others would appreciate me documenting my learnings here.
In this blog-post I’ll give an overview of the following topics
What I mean when I say lidar data processing
What a general lidar processing workflow entails
packages and resouces that help you step through a lidar processing workflow
Defining Lidar Data Processing
(more details to come)
General Lidar Processing Workflow
(more details to come)
Resources + Packages to Process Lidar Data
| Name | Reading and Converting LAS data | Chunked Reading | Classification | Parallization | Normalization | Rasterization | Language(s) | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| laspy | yes | yes | yes | no* | no* | no* | Python | Free |
| PDAL | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | yes | C++ (with python and Julia options) | Free |
| lastools | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | DOS | Some aspects are free |
| lidr | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | R | free |
| rlas | functions | automatically | called | by | lidr | package | ||