If you have followed this blog for a while, you will notice a continual returning to and refinement of ideas and topics. That’s how the blog started, and this role it has served, as a touch stone in my exploration of topics is critical to how I use it. I hope it is useful to you too, as a reader.
So, let’s talk about point clouds again. Point clouds are like ordinary geographic points — they have X, Y, and Z (typically), but there are a whole lot more of them than ordinary. How much more? Well, instead of thinking in the 100s of thousands, we think more along the lines of 100 of millions or billions of points.
The other thing we need to recognize about point clouds is that they may be n-dimensional — a LiDAR point cloud may have X, Y, Z, intensity, return number, class, etc..
Good Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) tools for dealing with point clouds include a spectrum of projects, including*PDAL (Point Data Abstraction Library), and the Pointcloud extension for PostgreSQL (with PostGIS integration, of course).
Previously, I was attempting to process large amounts of LiDAR point clouds in order to model bird habitat. Now that I have the requisite storage, and PDAL has a height calculator, I am ready to dive back into this.
In the meantime, there are some cool things to check in this space. Let’s start with this presentation by Michael Smith on PDAL from FOSS4G in Seoul last year.
Want to see some of the incredible things you can do in the browser, go no further than here:
This goes deeper than simple vector tile approaches and employs level of detail optimizations that are necessary for this large of a use case. More on this later
أكثر...
So, let’s talk about point clouds again. Point clouds are like ordinary geographic points — they have X, Y, and Z (typically), but there are a whole lot more of them than ordinary. How much more? Well, instead of thinking in the 100s of thousands, we think more along the lines of 100 of millions or billions of points.
The other thing we need to recognize about point clouds is that they may be n-dimensional — a LiDAR point cloud may have X, Y, Z, intensity, return number, class, etc..
Good Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) tools for dealing with point clouds include a spectrum of projects, including*PDAL (Point Data Abstraction Library), and the Pointcloud extension for PostgreSQL (with PostGIS integration, of course).
Previously, I was attempting to process large amounts of LiDAR point clouds in order to model bird habitat. Now that I have the requisite storage, and PDAL has a height calculator, I am ready to dive back into this.
In the meantime, there are some cool things to check in this space. Let’s start with this presentation by Michael Smith on PDAL from FOSS4G in Seoul last year.
Want to see some of the incredible things you can do in the browser, go no further than here:
This goes deeper than simple vector tile approaches and employs level of detail optimizations that are necessary for this large of a use case. More on this later
أكثر...