Pointcloud tiling software for .e57/.pts files

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Pointcloud tiling software for .e57/.pts files

Post by Inception »

I'm searching for a software suite/plugin that provides a simple method for pointclouds to be segmented by 'tiles'.

Some co-workers of mine have used lastool (lasclip) for previous mobile scanning data, however this only supports .las/.laz files. We are looking for an equivalent program that can deal with a wider variety of point cloud formats (.e57/.pts)

Image

Any help or points in a certain direction would be appreciated :)
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Re: Pointcloud tiling software for .e57/.pts files

Post by jedfrechette »

PDAL works great for this:

https://pdal.io/apps/tile.html

It supports las/laz, e57, pts, as well as a bunch of other formats.
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Re: Pointcloud tiling software for .e57/.pts files

Post by rollorigby »

FME also does this quite well across a number of formats
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Re: Pointcloud tiling software for .e57/.pts files

Post by smacl »

SCC has a wide range of tiling options and works with all open formats. This includes tiling and filtering based on grids, volumes (3d grids), chainage / offset ranges (e.g. distance along roads, rails, etc..), point count and arbitrary input polygons.
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Re: Pointcloud tiling software for .e57/.pts files

Post by landmeterbeuckx »

forgive my ignorance but what's the advantage of tiling?
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Re: Pointcloud tiling software for .e57/.pts files

Post by smacl »

landmeterbeuckx wrote: Thu Feb 18, 2021 11:46 am forgive my ignorance but what's the advantage of tiling?
A few that come to mind;
  • For very large models, such as road and rail, it enables multiple people to be working on the deliverable at one time. So for example, if you'd captured a 40k road network with a Pegasus system, your could give 4 operators 10k each and be able deliver the final job much faster.
  • Huge point cloud, e.g. 10s or 100s of billions of points, may very slow or impossible to process on some hardware and software configurations. In this scenario, tiling allows you to work with very large datasets on modest hardware.
  • Many geographical processing algorithms have a complexity greater than order n or O(n), e.g. O(n log n) or even O(n * n). If you throw a huge amount of unsegmented data at such algorithms, they will take an unacceptably long time to complete.
  • Tiled datasets can be faster to load, save and archive.
  • In very large areas, projects can be tiled for geodetic reasons, where each tile has an effective scale factor of 1.0 for engineering purposes and its own parameters to move between cartesian and geodetic coordinates. The London Survey Grid would be an example of this. High flown national mapping LAS data can be sparse and cover huge areas
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Re: Pointcloud tiling software for .e57/.pts files

Post by landmeterbeuckx »

smacl wrote: Thu Feb 18, 2021 11:59 am
landmeterbeuckx wrote: Thu Feb 18, 2021 11:46 am forgive my ignorance but what's the advantage of tiling?
A few that come to mind;
  • For very large models, such as road and rail, it enables multiple people to be working on the deliverable at one time. So for example, if you'd captured a 40k road network with a Pegasus system, your could give 4 operators 10k each and be able deliver the final job much faster.
  • Huge point cloud, e.g. 10s or 100s of billions of points, may very slow or impossible to process on some hardware and software configurations. In this scenario, tiling allows you to work with very large datasets on modest hardware.
  • Many geographical processing algorithms have a complexity greater than order n or O(n), e.g. O(n log n) or even O(n * n). If you throw a huge amount of unsegmented data at such algorithms, they will take an unacceptably long time to complete.
  • Tiled datasets can be faster to load, save and archive.
  • In very large areas, projects can be tiled for geodetic reasons, where each tile has an effective scale factor of 1.0 for engineering purposes and its own parameters to move between cartesian and geodetic coordinates. The London Survey Grid would be an example of this. High flown national mapping LAS data can be sparse and cover huge areas
Thanks Shane.

So you can select the tile to load in case of a road project for exemple and then the data itself will be loaded on the machine?
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Re: Pointcloud tiling software for .e57/.pts files

Post by smacl »

landmeterbeuckx wrote: Thu Feb 18, 2021 4:54 pm
smacl wrote: Thu Feb 18, 2021 11:59 am
landmeterbeuckx wrote: Thu Feb 18, 2021 11:46 am forgive my ignorance but what's the advantage of tiling?
A few that come to mind;
  • For very large models, such as road and rail, it enables multiple people to be working on the deliverable at one time. So for example, if you'd captured a 40k road network with a Pegasus system, your could give 4 operators 10k each and be able deliver the final job much faster.
  • Huge point cloud, e.g. 10s or 100s of billions of points, may very slow or impossible to process on some hardware and software configurations. In this scenario, tiling allows you to work with very large datasets on modest hardware.
  • Many geographical processing algorithms have a complexity greater than order n or O(n), e.g. O(n log n) or even O(n * n). If you throw a huge amount of unsegmented data at such algorithms, they will take an unacceptably long time to complete.
  • Tiled datasets can be faster to load, save and archive.
  • In very large areas, projects can be tiled for geodetic reasons, where each tile has an effective scale factor of 1.0 for engineering purposes and its own parameters to move between cartesian and geodetic coordinates. The London Survey Grid would be an example of this. High flown national mapping LAS data can be sparse and cover huge areas
Thanks Shane.

So you can select the tile to load in case of a road project for exemple and then the data itself will be loaded on the machine?
Hi Lieven,

Yes, a tile is essentially just another point cloud which is a subset of a larger point cloud. Sometimes you use different tiles on different PCs, other times on the same PC to overcome speed and memory limitations. In SCC in addition to automated tiling on import, we also allow creation of tiles on the fly, which is a bit like having a persistent limit box and navigation tools to interactively change tiles,

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Re: Pointcloud tiling software for .e57/.pts files

Post by smacl »

The latest update to SCC adds some significant new tiling functionality that includes on the fly tiling and conversion of massive point clouds using large polygon sets. Many thanks to Craig Papachrisostomou of Plowman Craven for properly putting this through its paces, tiling a 2 terabytes dataset across 30 thousand polygons, 250 of which contained data, to produce E57 files. Sample video of how this works below


youtu.be/J2AbxRPE_y0
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Re: Pointcloud tiling software for .e57/.pts files

Post by VXGrid »

Oh I'm late to the party.
You can do tiling in PointCab Origins as well.
Outputformats are for example rcp, las/laz, e57, xyz, ...
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