Does LAS tools - free edition alter LiDAR data?

[Adam Dąbrowski]

Yesterday I have been atending LiDAR workshops on ESRI LP360 software and when I said that I have been using LAStools the organizers have asked, am I aware that LAStools free edition changes the values during DEM creation. I was in a shock and thought they were joking but apparently they were serious about that. Have anyone encountered such problem in their work?

[Martin Isenburg]

Hello Adam,

You are not making friends when you mention LAStools at a workshop of some "other software" that as one of the very last ones in our industry does still not support reading or writing the free and open source LASzip format (*.laz) for storing compressed LiDAR.

There are two parts to LAStools, an open source one and a closed-source one. This is layed out in detail in the LICENSE.txt file. Should you use the "closed-source" part without a license you should limit your activities to only academic, research, grassroot, or hobby work and pay attention or work-around the license protection that varies from tool to tool. As license protection each tool from the closed-source side of LAStools will indeed inject a certain amount of noise into the output. This was designed to be low enough such that anyone (who is a little clever) can use LAStools for their academic, research, grassroot, or hobby needs yet it is bad enough to "keep" unlicensed commercial users from generating LiDAR deliverables for their customers.

http://lastools.org/LICENSE.txt  

It's maybe not perfect but - in combination with LASmoons - the best trade-off I was able to think up for enabling many people to use LAStools yet being sufficiently profitable to keep going as an independent or "rogue" LiDAR scientist ... (-;

Martin @rapidlasso

[Terje Mathisen]

Martin Isenburg wrote:
>
> Hello Adam,
>
> You are not making friends when you mention LAStools at a workshop of
> some "other software" that as one of the very last ones in our
> industry does still not support reading or writing the free and open
> source LASzip format (*.laz) for storing compressed LiDAR.
>
> There are two parts to LAStools, an open source one and a
> closed-source one. This is layed out in detail in the LICENSE.txt
> file. Should you use the "closed-source" part without a license you
> should limit your activities to only academic, research, grassroot, or
> hobby work and pay attention or work-around the license protection
> that varies from tool to tool. As license protection each tool from
> the closed-source side of LAStools will indeed inject a certain amount
> of noise into the output. This was designed to be low enough such that
> anyone (who is a little clever) can use LAStools for their academic,
> research, grassroot, or hobby needs yet it is bad enough to "keep"
> unlicensed commercial users from generating LiDAR deliverables for
> their customers.
>

> http://lastools.org/LICENSE.txt Â

>
> It's maybe not perfect but - in combination with LASmoons - the best
> trade-off I was able to think up for enabling many people to use
> LAStools yet being sufficiently profitable to keep going as an
> independent or "rogue" LiDAR scientist ... (-;
>

I think you have found something very close to optimal in this regard,
it is indeed possible to useful work while staying within the
hobby/non-commercial restrictions of LAStools. In my case I worked for 4
years (pro bono of course!) on the base maps for the Junior World
Championship in Orienteering which took place this summer in Rauland,
Telemark (in Norway).

This event was recently hailed as the best orienteering event of the
year here in Norway, and according to the international observers, also
of the world, and it was handled completely by volunteers. Possibly the
single most important ingredient for such a championship is the map
quality, and I can say with certainty that those maps got a big boost
from the base maps, something which would have been impossible without
LAStools.

The _only_ exception to the strictly volunteer rule was the professional
field surveyors: The job of turning a base map into an international
competition map is so time-consuming that it simply cannot be handled by
a group of volunteers: Even if you can gather enough experienced
orienteers, the resulting map will be far too uneven, due to having so
many different people interpreting the terrain.

During the mapping process I received one of Martin's LASmoons licenses,
this allowed me to make several processing experiments much faster than
with my hobby workflow, but since I worked on this for such a long time
period, I had to stay within the license rules for all the base maps I
generated for the surveyors.

BTW, the following web page has most of the international events with
GPS tracking this year: http://www.tulospalvelu.fi/gps/

You can see the mapping results from some of those links, in particular

Sprint Men: http://www.tulospalvelu.fi/gps/20150705M20/
Middle Distance Women: http://www.tulospalvelu.fi/gps/20150707W20/ (won
by a girl from my club! :-) )
Long Distance Men: http://www.tulospalvelu.fi/gps/20150709M20/
Relay Women last leg: http://www.tulospalvelu.fi/gps/20150710W203/

Terje

--
- <Terje.M...@tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"