I have a Leica C10 terrestrial LiDAR (laser scanner) system. The system creates and stores point cloud data in a proprietary .bin file. Currently I have to use Leica's proprietary LiDAR software, Cyclone, to convert the files generated by the system to a format (e.g. LAS, e57, or ASCII) that can be read by other open-source software for processing point cloud data. Does anybody know of an open-source software that can read and convert the C10 .bin format? There does not appear to be a public description of the file format such that I can write my own translation tool.
asked Sep 15, 2014 at 15:39
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@AndreSilva, Unfortunately no, the native format created by the scanner is not the E57 format. Cyclone can be used to convert it to an E57, but you still need the software to do so. I sure wish that it did create the E57 though. There are plenty of OS software that'll work with that standard.– WhiteboxDevSep 15, 2014 at 17:34
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@AndreSilva I know I saw the question over on SO (stackoverflow.com/questions/11609773/…) where the one post suggested that Leica was going to support E57 with their C10 scanner, but they only did so through data conversion within Cyclone as far as I can tell.– WhiteboxDevSep 15, 2014 at 17:37
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1@AndreSilva, I took that as being the case when I purchased the scanner as well but unfortunately it seems to be tied to their software. Anyhow, thanks for your help. Hopefully someone will have some experience with it.– WhiteboxDevSep 15, 2014 at 17:41
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2I remember communicating with Leica about their binary format 5-6(!) years ago when working on the "point-cloud-tools". There was a reluctant promise and pointing out that ASCII is platform-independent. Their ASCII exports can be rather heavy, and not always consistent, e.g., could have headers in the middle for combined point clouds. Sorry, this is not helping just sympathetic.– rychOct 9, 2014 at 1:56
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1@rych Yes, their ASCII formats are a bit clunky but the worst part is that the system itself doesn't even output them that I can see. To generate ASCII files, you need to export the original binaries using their software, which ties you to their software. I'd be happy if there were an ASCII export option from the LiDAR itself even if it were an odd ASCII format. It's hard to imagine that this has been going on for six years!– WhiteboxDevOct 9, 2014 at 11:46
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1 Answer
You might check whether or not the C10 .bin file is actually a TerraSolid file. PDAL provides a reader for TerraSolid .bin plus numerous other point cloud formats.
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1PDAL can read TerraSolid .bin files and convert them to LAS. There are many flavors of .bin files, however, so you often don't really know what exactly you have. PDAL only does TerraSolid. Nov 10, 2015 at 1:17