Hello,
I have received several complaints that the integration of LASzip is not as trivial as it should be. There was either a dependency on libLAS or PDAL, an incompatible license issue (R) via LASlib, or the unwelcome exercise for the user to write their own DLL wrapper. Kudos to those who managed to integrate LAZ support into their products despite these hurdles (see
http://laszip.org for a list).
Now there is an easy-to-use, stand-alone, ultra-light-weight DLL that can read and write both LAZ and LAS files up to LAS version 1.3 (and if only point types 0 - 5 are used then also LAS version 1.4). The new DLL interface together with a small laszipdllexample.cpp compressor/decompressor tool that illustrates how to use the DLL is available in the latest (130729) release of LAStools available here:
Recent conversations have suggested that missing LAZ support in some popular geo-spatial products such as IMAGINE, ArcGIS, or Terrascan must be blamed on my lack of providing a clean and simple way to integrate LASzip compression into other software. I hope this new LASzip DLL will remedy this soon ... (-:
Cheers,
Martin
PS1: please let me know if you find any bugs or issues with the DLL
PS2: there are also two new tools: lasnoise and blast2iso
PS3: lascanopy now also computes skewness and kurtosis