A workshop designed for FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2018
Dr. Adam Steer
http://spatialised.net
@adamdsteer
adam@spatialised.net
This repository contains materials for a point cloud processing workshop developed by Dr. Adam Steer.
It uses the Point Data Abstraction Library (PDAL), Entwine Python, Numpy, Jupyter notebooks, and the Potree point cloud visualiser to develop some concepts about processing point clouds and visualising results.
Text relating to the workshop is contained in workshop. Jupyter notebooks used in the workshop are contained in notebooks. Sample workflows as PDAL pipelines are contained in resources.
This workshop requires a PDAL installation with python bindings. Using Conda is convenient, but a native installation should work just fine as well. However PDAL is installed, it needs to be visible to a Jupyter notebook.
Using Conda, create a new virtual environment like:
conda create -n f4g-pdal-workshop python=3.6 pdal numpy jupyter python-pdal pandas matplotlib -c conda-forge
This creates a virtual environment with PDAL and numpy (and more) installed, using the conda-forge channel. Head to a command line interface, switch to the exercises directory in this repository and type:
source activate f4g-pdal-workshop
..and then:
jupyter notebook
...to get access to the processing notebooks.
You'll still need to run entwine via docker, so:
docker pull connormanning/entwine
If you don't want to use Jupyter, no drama - most processes can be done at the command line using dockerised PDAL, which you can get via:
docker pull pdal/pdal:1.8
...but stick with us - instructions for dockerised processing are included in the notebook!
To visualise some data products, please ensure you have:
- QGIS or an alternate viewer for geoJSON and georeferenced raster data
- CloudCompare or an alternate LAS/LAZ file viewer
...especially if you're not using Jupyter notebooks to run tasks.
For command line processing and demonstrating PDAL in Python we'll use: https://s3.amazonaws.com/f4g-pdal-workshop-sampledata/T_316000_235500.laz
This data sample comes from the New York University LiDAR survey of Dublin, Ireland: https://geo.nyu.edu/catalog/nyu-2451-38684
For PDAL pipelines and Entwine we'll use: https://s3.amazonaws.com/f4g-pdal-workshop-sampledata/APPF-farm-sample.laz
This data sample is a photogrammetric point cloud collected by the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility (http://appf.edu.au).
Please download these ahead of the workshop.
Feel free to explore and use the workshop materials as you see fit, acknowledgment is appreciated. All data samples used in this workshop are licensed CCBY4 and available in public repositories.
I'd also be very happy to run this workshop (or similar ones) for your organisation - please contact me for details.