Vertical Complexity Index Rasters Nomenclature

[Monica Carriere]

Hi,

Im working with lascanopy to compute VCI metrics. I have used the default setting given in lascanopy documentation, which is -vc 1 2 4 -vci 2.5 5. I assume these two arguments (-vc or -vci) give the same output. The thing is i have as an output 5 rasters, named vc0, vc1, vc2, vc3, vc4, and I don't know which one corresponds to which bin size. I would appreciate some help with that to clearly understand my outputs. I tried to apply same logic as the count rasters, which give one raster per interval, but i understand that here with the VCI there is no interval, each bin size value has its raster, so I have 2 rasters left out. Thanks in advance.

Greetings,

Monica. 

[LAStools - efficient tools for LiDAR processing]

Hi Monica,

you are right: -vc is exact identical to -vci.

All numbers you put behind one of this arguments will be created as output bin. The file names will contain the ordinal number of the occurrence in the command.

If you write

    lascanopy64 -i in.laz -o tmp.laz -v -vc 1 2.5 5 8.8

will create the files

    tmp_vc0.laz

    tmp_vc1.laz

    tmp_vc2.laz

    tmp_vc3.laz

where 

    tmp_vc0.laz will contain bin size 1,

    tmp_vc1.laz will contain bin size 2.5,

    tmp_vc1.laz will contain bin size 5,

    tmp_vc1.laz will contain bin size 8.8

The result will be absolute identical to

    lascanopy64 -i in.laz -o tmp.laz -v -vc 1 2.5 -vci 5 8.8

    lascanopy64 -i in.laz -o tmp.laz -v -vci 1 2.5 5 8.8

    lascanopy64 -i in.laz -o tmp.laz -v -vci 1 2.5 -vc 5 8.8

Cheers,

Jochen @rapidlasso