Reading LiDAR attributes from a .mat file?

Question

I am working on some LiDAR dataset. I am used to importing the LiDAR data from .las files. I generally use liblas library in Python to import the same.

Recently, I found the dataset in .mat format which is actually a structure in MATLAB. What I am able to see in that file is only a single cell which contains all the x,y,z,intensity fields as attributes.

So, to be clear, my query is how to convert this .mat file to .las file so that I can directly read the attributes using liblas?

Answer 1

One option is to convert your .mat file into a text file (.txt), and then, convert it to .las outside MATLAB.

A file with .mat extension can be read with function load. See Supported File Formats for MATLAB.

M = load(filename.mat)

To convert it, try dlmwrite(filename,M), which "writes numeric data in array M to an ASCII format file, filename, using the default delimiter (,) to separate array elements."

dlmwrite(filename.txt,M)

Then, use some point cloud processing software to convert from .txt to .las. For example, see:

Finding outliers with wrong Z values in LIDAR data.