Julia package for reading and writing the LAS lidar format.

This is a pure Julia package for reading and writing ASPRS .las files. Currently only LAS versions 1.1 - 1.3 and point formats 0 - 3 are supported. For LAZ support see below.

If the file fits into memory, it can be loaded using

using FileIO, LasIO
header, points = load("test.las")

where header is of type LasHeader, and, if it is point format 3, points is a Vector{LasPoint3}. LasPoint3 is an immutable that directly corresponds to the binary data in the LAS file. Use functions like xcoord(p::LasPoint, header::LasHeader) to take out the desired items in the point.

If the file does not fit into memory, it can be memory mapped using

using FileIO, LasIO
header, points = load("test.las", mmap=true)

where points is now a memory mapped PointVector{LasPoint3} which behaves in the same way as the Vector{LasPoint3}, but reads the points on the fly from disk when indexed, not allocating the complete vector beforehand.

See test/runtests.jl for other usages.

We advise to use LazIO, which works out of the box and is compatible with LasIO.

The compressed LAZ format is supported by LasIO itself, but requires the user to make sure the laszip executable can be found in the PATH. LAZ files are piped through laszip to provide reading and writing capability. laszip is not distributed with this package. One way to get it is to download LAStools from https://rapidlasso.com/. The LAStools ZIP file already contains laszip.exe for Windows, for Linux or Mac it needs to be compiled first. When this is done this should work just like with LAS:

using FileIO, LasIO
header, points = load("test.laz")