Other point cloud viewers

Other Point Cloud Viewers and Lidar tools:

Must have

mcc-lidar
LAStools (read license carefully)
Cloud Compare
Fusion

ESRI zLAS converter

OPALS - Orientation and Processing of Airborne Laser Scanning data--does classification, among other things. Must license for more than 1 million points.

Commercial, no demo version: http://lidarwidgets.com/

PDAL

OpenLSEF: https://beta.openlsef.org/digital-elevation-models/ Extracting information for 3D point clouds

Web viewers:

http://plas.io/ LAS and LAZ input, locally and some web samples
http://potree.org/
https://usgs.entwine.io/ USGS online viewer for lidar
http://speck.ly demonstrates Greyhound+Entwine in action. Both software components are open source. Variety of data sets online.
Handheld: LiMo: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ogs.limo
- File extensions must be lower case
- 3D motion hard to understand
- Color for 3D geotiff all the same
  - Help file does not work
http://ahn2.pointclouds.nl/ Netherlands viewer, with ability to download points in LAZ format; source code available

Python for lidar

Tree segmentation

Create point clouds

Others--some of these may be old; they have not been systematically checked in several years

http://www.lidarbasemaps.org/ LIDAR links
Meshlab: will open XYZ import, but probably less useful than Cloud Compare
http://bcal.geology.isu.edu/Envitools.shtml BCAL LiDAR Tools are open-source tools developed by Idaho State University, Boise Center Aerospace Laboratory (BCAL). These tools can be used for processing, analyzing and visualizing LiDAR data. They are written in IDL programming language. Version 2.x.x can be run with free IDL Virtual Machine, and does not need ENVI software.
http://lidar.ihrc.fiu.edu/lidartool.html ground point classification, last revised 2007, input is ASCII files (from tape).
PulseTools for full waveform analysis: https://github.com/PulseWaves/PulseWaves/tree/master/PulseTools
canupo: classification, mostly designed for terrestrial lidar scanners; now plugin for Cloud Compare
- http://www.geosciences.univ-rennes1.fr/spip.php?article1284&lang=fr

*PointVue LE – free and easy to download with no hidden links. It easily opens LAS files and displays the point cloud; it can display intensity, elevation, return number, and classification and allows the user to overlay the intensity on any of the other categories. It appears to no longer be available.

This is probably now http://www.lp360.com/lp-viewer.html but we have not tested it.

LizardTech GeoViewer 5.5

http://www.lizardtech.com/download/dl_options.php?page=viewers
no registration
Latest DirectX required
LAS and MrSID compressed lidar (have not seen an example) formats.
Display in the 3D viewer is a bit awkward compared to PointVue. I can’t seem to make the entire image display without it feeling too far away. (Maybe it’s just the box around it.); in addition, the only category displayed is elevation and the contrast is a bit too high, so everything is too bright and it’s hard to distinguish the images.
LizardTech Lidar Compressor ($3K, but free trial available)--have not seen data in their format

MARS Viewer (free, but requires registration and download of 30 day free trial)

Fledermaus and free iView4D viewer. It appears that the free iView4D will only display the proprietary formats, and we have not found a free way to create those except through Fledermaus (and our attempts there have not been successful). There is a module in Mirone (no longer online, had Matlab source code), so that might be possible with some effort.

DielmoOpenLidar: http://www.dielmo.com/eng/ficha-tecnologia.php?prod=27 based on gvSIG

http://www.pointclouds.org/

Lidar Point Cloud Data Sources

LIDAR links: http://www.lidarbasemaps.org/

LIBLAS: http://liblas.org/LAStools.html#LAStools-liblas

http://applied-geosolutions.github.io/lidar2dems/ classify into ground and non ground, create DTM, DSM, or CHM. Python on Linux.

African and Middle East archaeology

Last revised 10/31/2019