lascolor calls error over BigTIFF, even though .tif is small

[Stephen Escarzaga]

Hello,

I'm trying to color a rather large laz file (around 10.6 gigs and ~3 billion points) of ariborne lidar data. I'm using 1m NAIP imagery TIFF of the area. The tool first called the error over the big tiff with a 4-band, 8-bit image with an uncompressed size of 2.63 GB. I then re-exported this image (In ArcMap) with the "Use Renderer" and "Force RGB" box checked which brought the the size down to 1.93 GB and the bands down to 3. Still getting the BigTIFF error... I read that 5GB is the cut-off for BigTIFF...?

Each of the two .tif files I tried have their corresponding .tfw files (however, one has an associated .ovr file that is quite large).

What am I doing wrong? 

Here's the command:

lascolor -i "i:\ElPaso_Airborne_Lidar\Data\elpaso_fema_als_merged.laz" -image "i:\ElPaso_Airborne_Lidar\imagery\EP_NAIP_8bit2.tif" -olaz

Here's the error:

i:\ElPaso_Airborne_Lidar\imagery\EP_NAIP_8bit2.tif: This is a BigTIFF file.  This format not supported

by this version of libtiff..

ERROR: failed in XTIFFOpen

ERROR: cannot open TIF image 'i:\ElPaso_Airborne_Lidar\imagery\EP_NAIP_8bit2.tif'

ERROR: reading 'i:\ElPaso_Airborne_Lidar\imagery\EP_NAIP_8bit2.tif'

Many thanks,

Stephen E.

[Martin Isenburg]

Hello Stephen,

lascolor does not support BigTIFF. Maybe you can use GDAL to convert your (small?) ortho image to a regular TIF?

Regards.

Martin

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[Kyriakos Zantis]

Hello i have the same problem. I have .tiff 200MB. There in all in  CGRS93 in Cyprus local transformation. What might be the problem?

[Martin Isenburg]

Hello,

this is a memory issue as the lascolor.exe binary is a 32 bit executable that can at most allocate 2 GB of main memory. Your compressed TIFF uncompresses to almost 2 GB and together with the other data that lasnoise allocates this seems to exceed 2GB. I should have a 64 bit version of lascolor called lascolor64 available for you shortly that overcomes this issue. Wait for my email on that.

Regards.

Martin @rapidlasso

--

[Martin Isenburg]

Hello,

please download this 64 bit version of lascolor and try the exact same command line with the only difference being that you call lascolor64.exe instead of lascolor.exe

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jbvbuiexf3019w7/lascolor64.exe

Regards,

Martin @rapidlasso

[Kyriakos Zantis]

Thank you. It worked sort of. It keeps showing me this message although i have .tif image

[Sam Hackett]

So it was successful even though the warning?

Note that the image extension does not limit or manage the compression type. .tiff images can have many types of compression and can be 'bigtiff' format. If they are above 4GB bigtiff is required. As far as I know Bigtiff doesnt support jpeg compression.

For large datasets you may have success by tiling the imagery and pointcloud with the same tiling scheme and having identical names. Allows a tiling workflow for lascolor.

Sam

[Patrick]

Any suggestions for software that can tile the tif at the right origin, based on the projection system we're using in our las tiles?