Colorize Aerial Lidar

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dmanning
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Colorize Aerial Lidar

Post by dmanning »

I typically work with terrestrial data but have been asked to look at colorizing an aerial LAS with ortho imagery. What software would you recommend to accomplish this? Commercial, experimental, or freeware is fine.
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piotr.pioro
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Re: Colorize Aerial Lidar

Post by piotr.pioro »

Hello Dustin,

You can do that using e.g. lascolor or TerraSolid. Both programs are payed. Better way to colorize aerial data is using images with external orientation.

Links below:
https://rapidlasso.com/lastools/lascolor/
http://www.terrasolid.com/products/terrascanpage.php

If you will have further questions feel free to contact via pm, maybe I can help you in this project.

regards
Piotr
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Re: Colorize Aerial Lidar

Post by vislaw »

I will be interested to learn what solutions are available so hopefully people will post their suggested workflows.

I personally am a 3DS Max user and I'm a big fan of the TERRAIN plugin written by Chris at Megafiers (http://www.west-racing.com/mf/?page_id=2979). It is designed to extract Google Earth terrain data but it also serves as an elegant tool to pull the Google ortho imagery at whatever resolution you desire. You simply import a KMZ file representing the boundaries of your scan data and it will generate a matching texture map as a BMP or JPEG file.

If you wish to apply the texture to your LAS point cloud and render in 3DS Max you will need to convert the cloud and either use Clouds2Max or the native Point Cloud capabilities of current editions of Max to bring it into the application.
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Re: Colorize Aerial Lidar

Post by jedfrechette »

PDAL (opensource) works great for this:

http://www.pdal.io/workshop/exercises/a ... ation.html
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Re: Colorize Aerial Lidar

Post by jrbrown »

We currently use Lastools (specifically LASCOLOR) and have no issues whatsoever. It's easy to use and quick.

https://rapidlasso.com/lastools/
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Re: Colorize Aerial Lidar

Post by Poux »

PDAL works great, else, more user friendly, the software FME (starting 2015) which has functions and reader/writer for point clouds. One function for colorizing : https://knowledge.safe.com/articles/109 ... louds.html
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Re: Colorize Aerial Lidar

Post by lukasfraser »

piotr.pioro wrote: Tue Nov 15, 2016 1:38 pm Hello Dustin,

You can do that using e.g. lascolor or TerraSolid. Both programs are payed. Better way to colorize aerial data is using images with external orientation.

Links below:
https://rapidlasso.com/lastools/lascolor/
http://www.terrasolid.com/products/terrascanpage.php

If you will have further questions feel free to contact via pm, maybe I can help you in this project.

regards
Piotr
Hi Piotr,

Can you use the exterior orientation file + images to get a true colorization in TerraSolid without the TerraPhoto extension? I have LASTools and TerraScan, but am looking to do better than just a "top down" colorization.
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