The OpenTopography Tool Registry provides a community populated clearinghouse of software, utilities, and tools oriented towards high-resolution topography data (e.g. collected with lidar technology) handling, processing, and analysis. Tools registered below range from source code to full-featured software applications. We welcome contributions to the registry via the Contribute a Tool page.
Appearance of a tool in the OpenTopography Tool Registry does not imply endorsement, recommendation, or support, by the NSF OpenTopography Facility and is meant simply as a service to our users. OpenTopography does not guarantee the completeness or accessibility of specific content and links contributed by users. If you have been directly involved with the development of a registered tool and are not the original contributor of the tool to the registry, please email info@opentopography.org to supply updates or modifications to its entry.
Description: SAGA GIS is a FOSS which is, besides common GIS tasks, specialized on digital terrain analysis. The software provides a lot of analysis tools which you will not find in any other software package, e.g. for morphometric or hydrologic analysis. SAGA supports various raster and vector (including LAS and SAGA point clouds) formats, DEM generation, analysis and visualization (e.g. 3D point cloud viewer, bare earth extraction). One of SAGA's main objectives is to provide scientists an easy to use API to implement own algorithms (C++) but it is also used in commercial environments. SAGA provides a GUI and can be scripted in various ways (e.g. batch/bash, python). SAGA runs on Windows, Linux and FreeBSD, both 32 and 64bit. The software is licensed under the GPL (GUI, most of the modules) and the LGPL (API).
Description: LAStools are a collection of highly-efficient, batch scriptable, multi-core command line tools for processing LiDAR that is built upon LASlib (with LASzip).
lasground.exe extracts the bare-earth by classifying all ground points
lasoverlap.exe checks overlap & vertical/horizontal alignment of flight lines
lascontrol.exe quality checks elevations for a list of control points
lasclassify.exe find buildings and the trees above the ground
lasgrid.exe rasters very large LAS files into elevation or intensity grids
lasboundary.exe extracts a boundary polygon that encloses the points
lasheight.exe computes for each point its height above the ground
lasclip.exe clips points against building footprints / swath boundaries
lastile.exe tiles huge amounts of LAS points into square tiles
laszip.exe compresses the LAS files in a completely lossless manner
lasinfo.exe prints out a quick overview of the contents of a LAS FILE
lasindex.exe creates a spatial index LAX file for fast spatial queries
txt2las.exe converts LIDAR data from ASCII text to binary LAS format
las2txt.exe turns LAS into human-readable and easy-to-parse ASCII
lasmerge.exe merges several LAS files into one
lassplit.exe splits points of one (or many) LAS files into flight lines
lassort.exe sorts points by gps_time, point_source, or into spatial proximity
las2las.exe extracts last returns, clips, subsamples, translate
Description: Easy to use 3D toolbox for finding, filtering, clipping and visualizing point cloud data. Designed by surveying professionals to streamline point cloud workflows and reduce processing time, often by 50% or more. Find, Download, Colorize, Visualize, Extract and Filter Point Cloud and public domain lidar data for all 50 states
Visualization, DEM generation, Data Management / Handling, Software Suite