How to add buffers to preexisting files while preserving the original tile schema naming conventions

[Grga Franges]

Hi there! 

My company is evaluating LAStools, primarily for processing of national LiDAR datasets of Croatia. These datasets are tiled in a custom schema with a particular naming convention, which are important to keep for common reference when communicating with National geodesic authority and other institutions. 

What would be the simplest way to add buffer to these tiles while preserving the original tiling schema and file names?

We did index the files with lasindex64 and then tried to use lastile64 to buffer, but lastile insists on retiling the whole show to squares and renaming files.

We hoped las2las might support on the fly buffering, and while it does recognize the -buffered flag and states that it's adding points while reading the files, the output is not buffered. Unfortunately it does not recognize -remain_buffered flag that is available for some other tools..

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[LAStools - efficient tools for LiDAR processing]

Hi Grga,

probably you can store/preserve your original tiles using lasboundary, the use lasindex and lastile to tile and process your files, at the final end you can use lasclip to restore the original boundaries.

Another option to extract the boundaries of the files would be lasinfo64 and JSON output. This would need some (python) programming to store and later restore the boundaries using las2las.

Good luck,

Jochen @rapidlasso

[Grga Franges]

Hi Jochen!

Thank you for a fast answer. I came up with a similar plan but it seems like a lengthy procedure for a simple operation, and if the dataset is large a lot of disk space is required for these intermediate steps.  

But I was wondering: 

• This feature is already half implemented -  it's available in a lot of tools trough "-buffered" "-remain_buffered" flags and it works really nice there. It's already half baked in tools like las2las because they recognize the "-buffered" flag and only thing missing is the implementation of "-remain_buffered". It would be a really useful addition for us that have to deal with custom tiling that has to be preserved for some reason.
• In the meantime i'm thinking about a hack - would it be possible to creatively use some of the tools that already support this workflow (like lasground) to actually do nothing on the data but add buffers and leave them on trough "-remain_buffered" flag? I'll explore this the first opportunity i get, but if some combination of tools/parameters falls to your mind feel free to shorten my search.

Best regards,

                  Grga