Splitting LiDAR point clouds

Discrete LiDAR

In the case of purely discrete point clouds we can use lasmerge to produce equal divided files.

A script exists to do this automatically:

split_las.py (-d INPUTDIR | -f INPUTFILE) [-o OVERLAP] outputdir fraction

This can be run on either a single file or a directory of las files.

Use -o to specify the number of seconds of overlap, this can be used with the airplanes ground speed to calculate overlap. For instance 7 seconds 140 knots will result in an overlap of 504 metres (7 seconds * 72 m/s). Give the script a fraction for the number of lines to divide the line into, I usually just give it 3.

Full Waveform

Full wave form data cannot use the script above. Unfortunately you will need to produce this using alspp and its fence feature.