A software toolbox for LiDAR data handling and analyses (LiVT 1.0.0.19) has been developed within the framework of ArcLand by the project partners from the State Office for Cultural Heritage Management Baden-Wuerttemberg, Esslingen/DE (Ralf Hesse). The tool can be downloaded here (284.26 kB) for free, a presentation, introducing this software at the CAA Germany meeting in February 2013 is available here (44.09 MB) (at the moment only in German). For further questions please get in touch with This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

The toolbox is also available as an Open Source project on sourceforge, see more on https://www.archaeolandscapes.eu/index.php/en/news-a-events/news/415-lidar-visualisation-toolbox-goes-open-source.html.

Disclaimer

This version is an early beta release - use at your own risk. Please be happy about those things that work and report any bugs that are not listed in the known bugs list at the end of this document to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

General information

The intention behind this Lidar Visualisation Toolbox is to provide an easy-to-use, stand-alone application to create visualisations from high-resolution airborne LIDAR-based digital elevation data. LiVT also includes tools like raster file creation from xyz point clouds. A few mouse clicks and some processing time should be enough to go from an xyz ASCII file to a grey-scale SVF image, an LRM map or a percentage map of cumulative visibility. As LiVT does not include a data viewer, additional software will be necessary to display the processing results. All algorithms in the data processing tabs output floating point raster maps. These can have quite narrow data ranges (e.g. SVF) and may require contrast stretch for display.

Installation

The software has been tested to run on 32-bit and 64-bit PCs with Microsoft Windows XP, Vista and 7. It requires the Microsoft .NET Framework version 4, so make sure to install this before installing LiVT. To install, unpack the zip file, double-click setup.exe and follow the instructions.

Getting started

Presently, file type support in LiVT is very limited. This means that files will probably have to be converted before they can be processed. LiVT reads and writes generic “raw” (binary) files with separate ascii headers. Binary files have to contain 32 bit (4 byte) floating point elevation data, and suffixes should be *.bil, *.bip. *.bsq, *.flt, *.dat or *.raw. The header file must have the same name as the binary data file and must have the suffix *.hdr. A typical header file will look like this:

BYTEORDER I

LAYOUT BIL

NROWS 1001

NCOLS 1001

NBANDS 1

NBITS 32

BANDROWBYTES 4004

TOTALROWBYTES 4004

BANDGAPBYTES 0

NODATA -9999

ULXMAP 3536300.000

ULYMAP 5375000.000

XDIM 1.000

YDIM 1.000

The user interface consists of a menu bar, an input file section and a tab menu section which offers different visualisation algorithms. The menu contains tools to rasterize xyz point clouds; in future there will be further tools for ASCII and raster data manipulation and analysis.