OpenTopography Tool Registry

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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.
Tool Name Date   Tool Type Rating
1   GDAL - Geospatial Data Abstraction Library 3 Dec 2010 Data Management / Handling
Keywords: DEM, osgeo, coordinates, file formats
License: MIT license / X11 license

Description: GDAL is a translator library for raster geospatial data formats that is released under an X/MIT style Open Source license by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. As a library, it presents a single abstract data model to the calling application for all supported formats. It also comes with a variety of useful commandline utilities for data translation and processing.

GDAL is a powerful tool for converting digital elevation model (DEM) formats, performing coordinate system conversions, and the gdaldem utility provides basic processing functionality such as generation of hillshades and slope maps.


2   CHaMP Transformation Tool 4 Sep 2014 Data Management / Handling
Keywords: transformation, georeferencing point cloud
License: GNU General Public License

Description: The Ecogemorphology & Topographic Analysis Lab (ET-AL) and the RSGIS Laboratory developed this ArcGIS Add-in for the transformation and projection of CHaMP field survey data (Bouwes et al. 2011) into real world coordinates given hand-held GPS coordinates from just three benchmarks. The CTT will work with any unprojected data in a file geodatabase, and gives you multiple ways to do an afine transformation based on a simple shift and rotation. Although other transformation tools exist in ArcGIS, there is not a simple sequence of geoprocessing tools, which allow you to transform vector data in a manner that preserves the high relative accuracy of a total station survey. See Wheaton et al. (2012) and the ReadMe page for more background.

3   fleurdelas 21 Nov 2014 Visualization, Point Cloud Analysis, Data Management / Handling
Keywords: las, idl, envi, waveform, point
License: GNU General Public License

Description: The fleurdelas class is an IDL/ENVI implementation of a LAS file reader/writer. The class object can read, write and manipulate points and/or full waveforms contained in the binary LAS file format. It can handle any LAS 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 with point format from 0 to 10. This class object therefore is very well suited to access the point structure information or the waveform information for further process. It can also filter the point cloud and generate new LAS file. However, if you need to manipulate; the Variable Length Records or the Coordinates System we will recommend you to use LAStools as it is more adapted for this purpose.