libLAS: Open Source LiDAR/LAS Format Library
Mateusz and I have been diligently working on a new open source (BSD licensed) library for reading the venerable LAS LiDAR format in C/C++. The library, called libLAS, exists to provide stream-based access to LAS 1.0/1.1 files. It builds on work by Martin Isenburg, but it attacks the problem with a software engineering tact, rather than aspiring to be functional academic software. Martin’s library, for example, just printed all of its errors to stderr, and it was expected to be used in the context of command line utilities for the most part — not embedded as a library in other software.
It is expected that we will eventually hook libLAS up to something like OGR to provide access to LiDAR data in the context of a GIS processing library. LAS data is typically very big (millions of points), so there will definitely be some challenges to overcome to make it useful in a library like OGR, but it should be useful for straight-ahead translation operations. There would be nothing preventing you from using libLAS in your own software development, however, and Mateusz and I are looking for collaborators to help polish the library and cover the usages that most people would want. Consider this weblog post as your call to participation!
February 9th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
I would add that it might be more reasonable to interpolate LIDAR cloud to grid structures and then use such algorithm as a foundation of GDAL driver, instead of treat LIDAR as vector and use with OGR driver.
Repeating Hobu’s call, developers, testers and users are wanted
February 9th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
This looks like an excellent update to H. Bowman’s r.in.xyz module for GRASS.
Direct access to LAS files along with gridding operators would be a nice thing to have in GDAL/OGR!
Great job!
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Sign me up!
I work with this data format everyday, along with gdal/ogr. It would be great to contribute any way.
Thanks!