Saturday, June 11, 2011

LIDAR data & jgrasstools and uDig

Well, we always like to look at things from different perspectives. And we are really fast when we use our own tools, that we can bend and change to our needs.

We are slowly bringing some las reader we wrote into the jgrasstools family, so that we then can add some analysis support. Sure thing nothing to do with the great laslib project, but it is handy for us to be able to certain tasks without dependencies and most of all be able to chain results into other modules directly.

So a first test takes 22M of points, filter them down to 12M (only first impulse) and splits them over 1M points shapefiles. I tried to write one single shapefile, but the geotools shp writer simply froze :) Will have to investigate further.

One thing uDig is really one of the best at, is to visualize HUGE amount of features. I am always amazed to see how well it does in that. Here 10M points loaded after properly stiling them by quantiles:



Yes, it already look nice for a first test. Zooming in it looks even better:



Yes, yes, shapefiles are maybe not the best format to use in this case, but hey, I really enjoy to play around with them to have a better feeling about what I am dealing with.

Well, this is a starting point. Let's see were it leads to...