pointzip compression for terrestrial PTS & PTX scans

[Martin Isenburg]

Hello,

Petabytes of scanned points produced in terrestrial scanning are still
stored as textual PTS or PTX files - unlike for mobile and airborne
LiDAR where binary LAS or compressed LAZ are used for data exchange,
transmission, or archival. We are talking about ASCII files that are
easily 10 GB, possibly much much bigger and it may take a while before
E57 can make some inroads here.

With pointzip (http://pointzip.org), I created a little LASzip based
compression tool the efficient world of binary file formats is just a
few easy mouse clicks away. (-: The pointzip.exe compressor stuffs
bloated PTS and PTX files into compressed LAZ or binary LAS files and
the pointUNzip.exe decompressor allows to recreate the PTS or PTX file
when needed because the "extra info" from the PTS and PTX files is
stored as a custom VLR (that could be exposed though the LASlib
interface).

Do you have large PTS or PTX files? The little lifesaver ducky (-:
and me would be delighted if you could test pointzip.exe on your files
and report back to us. You can download the program here
http://pointzip.org (see attached screen shots). I received several
such reports already:

"Confirmed: 7GB xyzRGB PTS to 916MB LAZ and 1.95GB xyziRGB to 195MB
LAZ [all rounded to mm] Great compression ratio, congrats!"

"I zipped a 3.71GB PTS file using xyziRGB parsing and mm precision.
My PTS file was from a HDS7000 merged with color photography. The
output file was 303MB LAZ in 5 minutes. That's a great compression
rate!"

"Works well on larger files as well. I was able to compress a 46 GB
PTS file to 3.5 GB LAZ @ mm accuracy in 73 minutes."

Regards,

Martin @rapidlasso

PS: Are there any other commonly used terrestrial ASCII scan formats
that I may be useful to add?