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).
 

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

Michael
 

very good video.
thank you very much!
 

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
 

Hello mmate nice blog