Best Software for LIDAR data?

Question

I will be working with LIDAR data soon and have heard that ESRI Tools are not particularly well adapted to work with LIDAR Datasets.

What are the best alternatives in your opinion? Which are generally considered to be the tops and flops of the LIDAR Sofware range? ...inlcuding of course all opensource solutions!

Thanks for you input,

Robert

Answer 1

Commercial: FME Desktop

" ability to take a point cloud that has no color information on it, and overlay it into an orthophoto to produce a colorized point cloud"

http://blog.safe.com/2012/01/beating-lidar-into-submission-with-fme-2012/

LP360 Add-on to ArcGIS http://www.qcoherent.com/products/index.html LP360 for ArcGIS™ (Basic, Standard and Advanced)

Open Source

LasTools - now has GUI

" a collection of highly-efficient, scriptable tools with multi-core batching that process LAS, compressed LAZ, Terrasolid BIN, ESRI Shapefiles, and ASCII."

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/lastools/ (Includes ArcToolBox option)

Python Lidar Tools

"FullAnalyze is a software for handling, visualizing and processing lidar data (3D point clouds and waveforms)" http://code.google.com/p/fullanalyze/

Answer 2

FUSION/LDV is a powerful and solid open source option developed by the USDA Forest Service to analyze and visualize LiDAR data. General information about FUSION can be found here:

Overview of FUSION features:

• Generates DEMs from point data
• Produces bare earth surfaces from unfiltered points
• Displays image data for background reference
• Subsamples large datasets
• Provides in-depth metrics for LiDAR point data
• Enables viewing of multiple LiDAR data files at once

Edit:

ArcGIS 10.1 has additional functionality over ArcGIS 10.0 to handle LAS datasets and visualize point clouds. Here is a link that talks about the integration of ArcGIS 10.1 and FUSION/LDV for Forestry purposes.

The new functionality provides an efficient method for multiple users to access, explore, and download lidar point cloud data. In addition 10.1 provides users the ability to visualize point clouds within ArcMap, examine 3D profiles, and interactively edit individual point classifications.

An excellent screenshot from the above link showing Arc's profile view of point cloud data:

Additional information on using lidar datasets in ArcGIS 10.1 available here.

Answer 3

I've used SAGA-GIS for identifying tree canopy and creating DSM's from Lidar data. I was very impressed.

SAGA seems to be an all around Vector/Rastor/Point Cloud processing tool. It is free and open source. It comes as 32-bit or 64-bit. It does have some scripting capabilities if you build the source code yourself with Python Bindings, but all the tools in the GUI are available as command line tools, so I just wrote my Python scripts using subprocess to call the SAGA command line tools.

My only complaint about it so far is that the documentation isn't very good and it is not necessarily the most intuitive environment.

It is definitely a very powerful platform.

Answer 4

You could also consider GRASS GIS as it has some good modules for processing and handling LiDAR data.

Answer 5

At my company, we use Terrasolid solutions for LIDAR data. It works as a plugin for microstaton and is suitable for both TLS and airborne lidar.