Heidelberg LiDAR Operations Simulator ++
HELIOS++ is a general-purpose software package for simulation of terrestrial, mobile and airborne laser scanning surveys written in C++11. It is developed and maintained by the 3DGeo Research Group at Heidelberg University.
Precompiled versions for Windows and Linux are available under releases.
As a starting point, please consult the wiki. We suggest you take the "first steps" tour to get to know the core concepts of the software.
Official website: https://uni-heidelberg.de/helios
For scientific and collaboration inquiries please contact the HELIOS++ team at helios@uni-heidelberg.de
We have also published a paper on HELIOS++. If you use HELIOS++ in a scientific context, please cite
Winiwarter, L., Esmorís Pena, A., Weiser, H., Anders, K., Martínez Sanchez, J., Searle, M., Höfle, B. (2022): Virtual laser scanning with HELIOS++: A novel take on ray tracing-based simulation of topographic full-waveform 3D laser scanning. Remote Sensing of Environment, 269, doi:10.1016/j.rse.2021.112772
BibTeX:
article{heliosPlusPlus,
title = {Virtual laser scanning with HELIOS++: A novel take on ray tracing-based simulation of topographic full-waveform 3D laser scanning},
journal = {Remote Sensing of Environment},
year = {2022},
volume = {269},
issn = {0034-4257},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2021.112772},
url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425721004922},
author = {Lukas Winiwarter and Alberto Manuel {Esmorís Pena} and Hannah Weiser and Katharina Anders and Jorge {Martínez Sánchez} and Mark Searle and Bernhard Höfle},
keywords = {Software, LiDAR simulation, Point cloud, Data generation, Voxel, Vegetation modelling, Diffuse media}
}
HELIOS++ can be invoked with following syntax:
helios --help
Show the help for helios++ usage
helios --test
Perform necessary tests to check everything works as expected
helios <survey_file_path> [OPTIONAL ARGUMENTS]
Perform requested simulation.
NOTICE specifying the path to the survey specification file is mandatory
Available general OPTIONAL ARGUMENTS are:
--assets <directory_path>
Specify the path to assets directory
--output <directory_path>
Specify the path to output directory
--writeWaveform
Specify the full waveform must be written
--calcEchowidth
Specify the full waveform must be fitted
--fullwaveNoise
Enable random noise at full waveform computation
--fixedIncidenceAngle
Sets incidence angle to exactly 1.0 for all intersections
--seed <seed>
Specify the seed to be used for randomness generation.
The seed can be an integer number, a decimal number or a timestamp
string with format "YYYY-mm-DD HH:MM:SS"
--lasOutput
Specify the output point cloud must be generated using LAS format
--zipOutput
Specify the output point cloud and fullwave must be zipped
--lasScale
Specify the scale factor used to generate LAS output
--parallelization <integer>
Specify the parallelization strategy. Where 0 leads to a simple
static/dynamic chunk based strategy and 1 leads to a warehouse
based strategy
-j OR --njobs OR --nthreads <integer>
Specify the number of simultaneous threads to be used to compute
the simulation
If it is not specified or it is specified as 0, then all available
threads will be used to compute the simulation
--chunkSize <integer>
Specify the chunk size. If it is positive, it will be used as a
fixed size but if it is negative the absolute value will be used
as starting size of a dynamic chunk-size based strategy.
--warehouseFactor <integer>
The number of tasks in the warehouse would be k times the number
of workers. Greater factor implies less probability of idle cores
at expenses of greater memory consumption.
--rebuildScene
Force scene rebuild even when a previosly built scene is available
--kdt <integer>
Specify the type of KDTree to be built for the scene.
Using 1 leads to the simple KDTree based on median balancing,
2 to the SAH based KDTree, 3 for the SAH with best axis criteria
and 4 (the default) to the fast approximation of SAH
--kdtJobs <integer>
Specify the number of threads to be used for building the KDTree.
Using 1 forces sequential building, 0 as many threads as available
cores and n>1 implies using exactly n threads.
Using more cores than required might degrade performance due to
overhead.
--sahNodes <integer>
Either how many nodes must be used by the Surface Area Heuristic
or the number of bins for the fast approximation of SAH
--disablePlatformNoise
Disable platform noise, no matter what is specified on XML files
--disableLegNoise
Disable leg noise, no matter what is specified on XML files
Available logging verbosity OPTIONAL ARGUMENTS are:
--silent
Nothing will be reported
-q OR --quiet
Only errors will be reported
-vt
Time and errors will be reported
-v
Errors, information and warnings will be reported
-vv OR -v2
Everything will be reported
IF NONE IS SPECIFIED
Errors and information will be reported by default
Available logging output mode OPTIONAL ARGUMENTS are:
--logFile
Reports will be emitted through standard output and output file
--logFileOnly
Reports will be emitted through output file only
IF NONE IS SPECIFIED
Reports will be emitted through standard output only
Unzip compressed output:
--unzip <input_path> <output_path>
When helios++ is executed with --zipOutput flag, output files are
compressed. They can be decompressed using --unzip.
The path to a readable helios++ compressed output file must be
given through input path.
The path to a writable file/location must be given through
output path.
The demo simulation can be executed as follows:
LINUX
run/helios data/surveys/demo/tls_arbaro_demo.xml
WINDOWS
run\helios.exe data/surveys/demo/tls_arbaro_demo.xml
Build instructions for advanced users and developers are available here.
For running pyhelios, we suggest setting up a seperate conda environment. After downloading one of the releases or building from source, run
conda env create -f conda-environment.yml
in the base environment of your conda installation, while you are in the HELIOS++ root directory. Then run
conda activate pyhelios_env
to activate the environment and
python pyhelios_demo\helios.py data\surveys\toyblocks\als_toyblocks.xml
to run a demo survey including visualisation.
See LICENSE.md