Useful Links

This page lists software and web pages that you may find useful. Obviously plenty of other software exists and may be useful, but these are some of the ones we know of and have found useful.

ARSF-relevant

• ​Main ARSF home page This is the home page for the overall ARSF facility (not just the data processing part)
• ​NERC Earth Observation Data Centre The archive of ARSF data is publicly available here (after registration)
• ​NERC Field Spectroscopy Facility
• ​Natural Environment Research Council NERC is the funding body for ARSF
• ​ARSF Tools on GitHub A collection of tools for working with ARSF data (including reading LiDAR data in LAS 1.3 format)

LiDAR

Software

• ​LAG Github page for our in-house LiDAR viewer
• ​LAStools Toolbox for processing of LiDAR data (open source and commercial components, source available from ​GitHub)
• ​Laspy A Python library for working with LAS files
• ​OPALS Software for processing discrete and full waveform LiDAR data (commercial, academic licenses available)
• ​SPDLib Open source library for storing and processing discrete and full waveform LiDAR data. Supports reading/writing LAS and ASCII files.
• ​SPD 3D Points Viewer Tool for 3D visualisation of LiDAR data in SPD format.
• ​PulseWaves Tools for working with full waveform data, and library for reading full waveform data in the pulsewaves format. (open and closed source components)
• ​Fleurdelas An open-source IDL reader/writer for LAS files
• ​LibLAS C/C++ library for reading/writing LAS files (largely replaced with LASlib from LAStools and laspy)
• ​plasio Online LAS file viewer (​source code)
• ​Lidarview Another online LAS file viewer
• ​fugroviewer LiDAR viewer (requires registration)
• ​fityk curve fitting tool (useful for full waveform LiDAR data). Free for version 0.9.8 and older.

Tutorials

• ARSF lidar tutorials. Covers creating a DEM and extracting waveforms.
• ​LAStools tutorial part 1 on quality checking
• ​LAStools tutorial part 2 on lidar preparation
• ​LAStools tutorial part 3 on DEM generation
• ​Create a DEM using LAStool in QGIS tutorial on using LAStools to create a DEM within QGIS
• ​SPDLib Tutorials Links to download data and workshop material for courses on SPDLib. Cover creating a DSM/DTM and processing using a HPC.

Other

• ​LAStools Google groups Forum for discussion of LAStools
• ​PulseWaves Google groups Forum for discussion of PulseWaves - also some general full waveform discussion

Hyperspectral

Software

• ​APL Github page for our in-house hyperspectral processing code
• ​ATCOR Program for atmospheric correction of spectral remote sensing data
• ​TuiView (ARSF Fork) Open source geospatial image viewer, supports viewing spectral profiles and opening zipped bil files (as provided with ARSF deliveries). ARSF fork can also read level1b files. Original version available from ​here

Tutorials

• ​Hyperspectral classification in QGIS Blog post describing supervised classification of hyperspectral data using QGIS.

Digital Photography

• ​ExifTool for reading tags in RCD tiff images.

General

Software

• ​ENVI Commercial geospatial image viewer.
• ​GDAL Geospatial Data Abstraction Library. An open source library for reading/writing common raster formats. Also provides a number of command line ​utilities for converting file formats, reprojecting data, creating mosaics etc.
• ​GRASS Open source GIS (powerful and full featured, but with a steep learning curve).
• ​QGIS Open source GIS package, latest version provides interface to GRASS tools.
• ​OSGeo4W Windows installation package for a number of open source remote sensing and GIS software packages (including GDAL, GRASS and QGIS).
• ​PROJ4 cartographic projections library useful for re-projecting point data but can be difficult to use.