R Package for Fast Airborne LiDAR Data Processing
The lasR
package (pronounce laser) does not intent to supersede the lidR
package, but is designed to be much more efficient than lidR
for common tasks like the production of CHM, DTM, tree detection and segmentation on large coverages. lidR
intends to be a tool box to make data exploration and innovation easy. lasR
on another hand focuses on production, being optimized for memory and speed and makes no trade off with other aspects of the development.
📖 Read the tutorial to start with lasR
Installation
There is currently no plan for releasing lasR
on CRAN. lasR
is hosted on r-universe
instead:
install.packages('lasR', repos = 'https://r-lidar.r-universe.dev')
Users can’t rely on the CRAN versioning system and RStudio update button to get the latest version of lasR
. When loading lasR
with library(lasR)
, an internal routine checks for the latest version and prints a message if a new version is available. Updates are more frequent this way.
Benchmark
The following benchmark compares how much time and RAM memory it takes for lasR
and lidR
to produce a DTM, a CHM, and a raster with two metrics derived from Z and intensity. The test was performed on 120 million points stored in 4 LAZ files. More details in the benchmark vignette.
Main differences with lidR
- Introduces the concept of pipelines, that is missing in
lidR
, to chain multiple operations on a point cloud optimally. - Is written exclusively in C/C++ without a single line of R.
- Uses the code of
lidR
but brings significant speed and memory improvements. - Does not load the point cloud into a
data.frame
. The point cloud is stored in a C++ structure that is not exposed to users. - Uses GDAL instead of relying on
terra
andsf
for more flexibility at the C++ level. - Has only 1 strong dependencies to
gdal
. But ifsf
andterra
are installed the experience is better.
More details in the corresponding vignette
About
lasR
is developed at Laval University.
Copyright Information
- For
lasR
:- © 2023-2024 Jean-Romain Roussel
- Provided under GPL-3 license.
- For
LASlib
andLASzip
:- © 2007-2021 Martin Isenburg - http://rapidlasso.com
- Provided under LGPL license and modified to be R-compliant by Jean-Romain Roussel.
- For
chm_prep
:- © 2008-2023 Benoît St-Onge - Geophoton-inc/chm_prep
- Provided under GPL-3 license.
- For
json
parser:- Lohmann, N. (2023). JSON for Modern C++ (Version 3.11.3) [Computer software]. https://github.com/nlohmann
- Provided under MIT license
- For
delaunator
:- © 2018 Volodymyr Bilonenko. delfrrr/delaunator-cpp
- Provided under MIT license
- For
Armadillo
:- © 2008-2024 Conrad Sanderson (https://conradsanderson.id.au)
- © 2008-2016 National ICT Australia (NICTA)
- © 2017-2024 Data61 / CSIRO
- Provided under Apache license