How to read/pre-process too large las file?

Hi everyone,

I have a las file of 50GB and I want to read/load it in MATLAB ( I have the lidar toolbox available).

I have a Mac from 2017 and it's just not able to handle such a file.

Is there a way to pre-process the las and/or reduce the size by selecting a subset of the area?

filename = '/LiDAR/lidars/terra_las/cloud_merged.las';
lasReader = lasFileReader(filename);
ptCloud = readPointCloud(lasReader);

Thanks a lot for your tip/suggestions.

Answer 1

[Venkat Siddarth]

Hi @Siegmund,

I understand you are looking for ways to pre-process and reduce its size by selecting a subset of the area .Here is a suggestion:

• You can use a software like LAStools to extract a subset of the point cloud data that you're interested in.Firstly,Using laszip function we can reduce the size of the LAS file. Then using a function called lasclip you can clip the file to a specific area.

To know more about these tools,follow the below link:

• https://lastools.github.io/
• https://github.com/LAStools/LAStools

I hope these suggestions help! Let me know if you have any further questions.

Regards,

Venkat Siddarth V

[Siegmund]

Thanks for your reply Venkat.

So there is no direct way of doing it in Matlab itself?