Saturday, February 25, 2012

Lidar data for vegetation mapping

I've written about my experiments in using lidar data and OL Laser to generate rough maps of runnability.  Here is a screen cast that demonstrates how I create the images.



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5 comments:

  1. Anonymous7:52 AM

    I am preparing base maps for a huge area in the mountains of Telemark, Norway. (About 115 km^2)

    The main problem with OL Laser for such a big area is that the source data consists of 67 separate LAS files, so it takes days to process them all manually. :-(

    (I am talking to the OL Laser author about adding a batch mode, and/or a command line interface.)

    Yesterday I used the open source LAStools utilities to process all the files at once, first generating a vegetation height map, then converting that to a grey-scale image (130 Mpixel!) image.

    I then used Photoshop (but many other programs would have done the same job) to first convert the grey scale image to an indexed format, then replaced the palette with a custom set similar to your setup, mapping various heights to different (mostly) green colors, before converting back to RGB jpeg.

    Total processing time was less than 30 min, with only 5 min of manual adjustments.

    Now I want to look into a more intelligent conversion process, looking not just at maximum canopy height but also the density of any intermediate returns (between ground and first return).

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  2. Anonymous11:26 AM

    I wish I had the trouble of dealing with 115 Km^2 of orienteering terrain!

    Michael

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  3. Moritz4:08 AM

    very good video.
    thank you very much!

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  4. Hi,

    nice instructive demo. Would be cool if you could do a similar analysis with LAStools. Check this powerpoint presentation for some guidance:

    http://lastools.org/download/lastools.ppt

    Cheers,

    Martin @lastools

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