LidarViewer

LiDAR Viewer is an application for visualizing and measuring 3D point cloud data, such as that collected via terrestrial or airborne LiDAR surveys. The software was developed to enable analysis of multi-billion-point lidar data sets without requiring binning, sub-sampling, decimation, or digital surface modeling. LiDARViewer enables real-time interactive visualization and analysis of datasets arbitrarily greater than a computer’s main memory by optimizing data handling using hierarchical data structures and view-dependent, multi-resolution, out-of-core rendering.

Point clouds are visualized with intensity coloring, user defined RGB coloring, or, to enhance feature recognition, a dynamic hillshading effect over which sun azimuth and elevation are adjustable in real-time. The point cloud remains fully manipulable in 3D at all times, so that interpretations and measurements can be evaluated from multiple viewpoints. In addition to interactive navigation, LidarViewer supports real-time point selection and extraction, fitting of geometric primitives (lines, planes, spheres, cylinders) to selected points, measurement of point locations and distances, visualization of point distances from a user-defined plane via plane-perpendicular adjustable color gradients, and extraction of profile curves.

LidarViewer communicates with proprietary data management programs so that quantitative measurements can be easily exported, managed, and integrated into a data analysis workflow.

More information about LiDAR Viewer is at http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/LiDAR.

LiDAR Viewer can be downloaded from http://wiki.cse.ucdavis.edu/keckcaves:lidar_viewer.