Problem creating 16-bit RGB rasters using blast2dem

[gberard]

Hello,

I'm attempting to rasterize a point cloud that was originally colorized using 16-bit imagery.  However I can't seem to get blast2dem to write out 16-bit TIFF files (or IMGs, for that matter).  Is this possible to do?  It seems to always scale down to 8-bit despite omitting the scaling option.

Here's the command I'm using:

blast2dem -rgb -step 0.5 -kill 1000 -keep_first -i I:\test\000066.las -o I:\test\000066.tif -nbits 16 -v

Either I'm missing something, it's a bug, or it hasn't been implemented.

This is with LAStools version 161114.

Thanks for any input.

Greg

[Martin Isenburg]

Hello Greg,

currently blast2dem does not support 16 bit RGB values and it would not be a trivial change to add that in the short term. Is it possible for you to instead implement this with las2dem by tiling your data into smaller tiles (with buffer), processing the tiles in parallel, and then merging them with GDAL or GRASS in the final step ... ? 

http://rapidlasso.com/blast2dem

http://rapidlasso.com/las2dem

Regards,

Martin @rapidlasso

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[gberard]

Hi Martin,

Thanks for the response.  Apparently I missed the notification in my email.

I suspected that was the case.  Are you saying that las2dem does indeed support writing 16-bit RGB values, though?  I could definitely make that work if so.

In the meantime I've been avoiding rasterizing at all and just reading the color values straight from the point cloud for analysis.  This is less convenient for visualization but probably more accurate in the end since things aren't being interpolated.

Thanks much,

Greg

[Martin Isenburg]

Hello Greg,

my bad. Only 8 bit RGB color channels are supported by las2dem, blast2dem, and lasgrid for point types 2, 3, 7, 8, and 10 with the '-rgb' option.

http://rapidlasso.com/las2dem

http://rapidlasso.com/blast2dem

http://rapidlasso.com/lasgrid

http://lastools.org/download/las2dem_README.txt
http://lastools.org/download/blast2dem_README.txt

http://lastools.org/download/lasgrid_README.txt

Regards,

Martin @rapidlasso