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Complete LiDAR Scan of England Publicly Available
- Doctor_Fegg 11y agoPeople have been experimenting with using this to contribute to OpenStreetMap for a couple of weeks now. Here's one writeup: http://chris-osm.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/extracting-building-heights-from-lidar.html http://chris-osm.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/extracting-building-...
- wielebny 11y agoLIDAR scans of Poland are available publicly from some time: http://geoportal.gov.pl/dane/numeryczne-modele-wysokosciowe http://geoportal.gov.pl/dane/numeryczne-modele-wysokosciowe
- rasz_pl 11y agofor a low low price of ~$1/km2 http://www.codgik.gov.pl/index.php/obsluga-klienta/oplaty-za-udostepnianie-materialow-fotogrametrycznych.html http://www.codgik.gov.pl/index.php/obsluga-klienta/oplaty-za... There is some mention of free access, but its behind wall of legal paragraphs and applications
- chatman 11y agoThis will be great as a base layer in OSM!
- JonnieCache 11y agoHell yes! This will be useful in my long term aim of procedurally generating rolling english hills for video game purposes... EDIT: with the resolution of this thing, maybe I won't need to generate them, maybe I can just set the game in the real england...
- Cthulhu_ 11y agoHas to be very long-term then, given the fact it's 11 terabytes. Of course, you probably won't need all of that data / resolution and would have enough of 1/20th of that.
- JonnieCache 11y agoExactly. Maybe I'd just need to extract some kind of statistical model.
- pjc50 11y agoAre you familiar with "Sir, You Are Being Hunted"? The game's developers have a great blog on their procedurally generated English countryside.
- JonnieCache 11y agoI had a look at that. They've done a great job of generating enclosed crop fields from voronoi diagrams, but that's not the kind of countryside I need, rolling hills and valleys. The south downs, basically. The topography is important for gameplay. BTW for anyone interested they did a talk at some conf or other which goes into more detail than the blogpost.
- hahainternet 11y agoYou don't need this data to do that. OSM already releases everything you need including gridded height data and vector building maps. I've used that data for this exact purpose before. Shoot me a message explaining what you're looking for.
- JonnieCache 11y agoThanks. You don't have an email in your profile though. The one in the email field is just for HN itself to contact you, you have to put it in the `about` field for other people to see it. EDIT: my email is in my profile, so hit me up if you dont want to expose yours.
- hahainternet 11y agoHey, I did, might be caught by spam given I have a terribly hacked up MX :D
- arethuza 11y agoI'm fascinated with the idea of simulating geological processes, particularly volcanism and glaciation - probably because I live in Edinburgh!
- NickHaflinger 11y ago'All 11 terabytes of our LIDAR data (that’s roughly equivalent to 2,750,000 MP3 songs)' or a stack of paper 513 kilometers high :)
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago[pedantic]Using what encoding, font, font size, margins, etc? [/pedantic]
- kraftman 11y agoAlso what gsm is the paper
- amag 11y agoAlso where would this stack of paper be placed? After all gravitational pull is not uniform around the planet.
- david-given 11y agoPaper's about 0.1mm thick. Therefore 513km of paper contains approximately 5.13 billion sheets. Given that there's 11TB of data, that means that each sheet contains about 2360 bytes. (Printing on one side.) That's an 80x30 grid. A4 is 210x297mm, so (holding the paper landscape for convenience and assuming a 2cm margin) that makes for 3.5x6.3mm letters. Different encodings give you slightly different sized letters, but it's all roughly the same. So I'd guess around 10 to 11 point. Has this helped?
- praseodym 11y agoThere is a similar dataset available for The Netherlands. A potree point cloud visualisation can be seen at http://ahn2.pointclouds.nl/ http://ahn2.pointclouds.nl/.
- pp19dd 11y agoThis is amazing. It took awhile to render at the max-zoom level but once the data loaded (and rendered), the level of detail is just astounding. You can see a construction crane and its counterweights imaged recognizably. Sagging power lines, just unbelievable.
- Tepix 11y agoThis is amazing. I love that they mention Minecraft as one of the use cases: "LIDAR data – some surprising uses:" "Computer games: Minecraft players have requested our LIDAR data to help them build virtual worlds: the data could be useful to anyone creating realistic 3D worlds."
- joosters 11y agoCan anyone recommend any 3d viewing programs for this data? This is all new to me but I'd love to try experimenting with it. The download zipfiles contain .asc files
- JorgeGT 11y agoI use the freely available FugroViewer, and manipulate the data with LAStools. If they are ASCII files you can use any program like python with matplotlib to make a 3D plot.
- JorgeGT 11y agoAn almost complete LiDAR scan of Spain is also publicly available. I wrote about it here and included a few samples: http://wechoosethemoon.es/2015/09/05/lidar-espana-3D/ http://wechoosethemoon.es/2015/09/05/lidar-espana-3D/ Sadly it is in Spanish but I hope available areas and pictures of expected results are clear enough! LiDAR data is provided as 2 Km x 2 Km squares of RGB-colored points in *.laz format. If someone is interested I can translate into English or point to the sources.
- diggan 11y agoHey Jorge, thanks for sharing! I would be interested in a translation, since I'm based in Barcelona and would love to do some experiments with the data, focused on Barcelona.
- JorgeGT 11y agoI will try to allocate time! Fortunately Barcelona is covered, you just need to head to this page: http://centrodedescargas.cnig.es/CentroDescargas/buscador.do http://centrodedescargas.cnig.es/CentroDescargas/buscador.do (there's an English button on the upper right corner) and select "LiDAR" in the menu. You can then select by drawing a polygon or uploading a shapefile and click search. You will be taken to a download page with the files that intersect your selection =) Edit: see for example this data in the Barceloneta area I just pulled: http://i.imgur.com/ayCK7MC.png http://i.imgur.com/ayCK7MC.png
- groth 11y agoAnyone know how burial mounds/roman roads are found? Would love to see that reproduced for the non-academic world.
- toyg 11y agoBasically you look for shapes. Usually you start from some vague idea, documents describing stuff that should be there, and then you look for shapes that look too peculiar for nature alone. See Portus for an example: natural ponds are not usually hexagonal...
- alphapapa 11y agoI was hoping to find some explanation of how they capture the data. I'm guessing it's from aircraft? It'd be interesting to read about how they stitch together and correct the data captured from a moving platform like that. And I wonder how long it takes to capture the whole country.
- hanoz 11y agoI took a look at this after it was mentioned on Hacker News two weeks ago and ended up building this map of all the DSM 1m data: https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map I've been quite fascinated to discover how many mysterious lumps and bumps are to be found all over the country, often with no apparent explanation in aerial photo maps, and to my great surprise I find myself cultivating an interest in armchair archaeology. I've stumbled across a few features which on further research have turned out to be sites of note, a couple of which were only discovered in recent years, which is quite exciting. Next mission is to discover something completely unknown. In fact I could do with some help interpreting some features if anyone here has any experience in this area. Here's a couple of well known sites: https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=SU1224642189 https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=SU1224642189 (Stonehenge) https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=SU1025569962 https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=SU1025569962 (Avebury) A few of my 'discoveries': https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=ST5895844810 https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=ST5895844810 (Medieval and Iron Age/Roman field systems near Croscombe, Somerset) https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=NY7217242430 https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=NY7217242430 (Potential henge near Alston, Cumbria) https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=SX1025261066 https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=SX1025261066 (Roman Fort near Restormel Castle, Cornwall) A couple of things I'm not sure about: https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=ST4580543091 https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=ST4580543091 https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=TL2327777126 https://houseprices.io/lab/lidar/map?ref=TL2327777126
- macca321 11y agoCool! How come my house (and much of central london) is missing?
- hanoz 11y agoSorry to hear about your house, my entire principality is missing, as the Welsh data is now looked after by the devolved equivalent agency, Natural Resources Wales. Happily it appears that's due to be released on November 2nd (http://naturalresources.wales/lidar?lang=en http://naturalresources.wales/lidar?lang=en) so hopefully I'll be able to incorporate that shortly after, depending on what it looks like. The current map is built with all the available DSM (Digital Surface Model) 1m resolution data. It appears the coverage is focused on coast and rivers, which makes sense in light of the Environment Agency's flooding remit. There's more coverage available to download at 2m (covering approximately half of the 1m gaps at a guess) and some small patches available at 50cm and 25cm resolutions.
- bsykora 11y agoLIDAR is also being used at NASA to measure atmospheric CO2 concentrations. http://decadal.gsfc.nasa.gov/ascends.html http://decadal.gsfc.nasa.gov/ascends.html [PDF]http://esto.nasa.gov/conferences/estf2011/presentations/Abshire_ESTF2011.pdf http://esto.nasa.gov/conferences/estf2011/presentations/Absh...
- scuba7183 11y agoAwesome! Does anyone know if similar resources for the US are available? Edit: possibly https://lta.cr.usgs.gov/LIDAR https://lta.cr.usgs.gov/LIDAR Still looking for more
- Twinklebear 11y agohttp://opentopography.org/ http://opentopography.org/ is a great resource for US LiDAR data.
- sliverstorm 11y agoThis tutorial will direct you to download DEM data for the US: http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/tutorials/how-to-create-garmin-topo-maps---part-2---elevation-data/ http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/tutorials/how-to-create-garmin-t... The map viewer you use: http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/ http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/ Info about the elevation data you get: http://nationalmap.gov/3DEP/3dep_prodserv.html http://nationalmap.gov/3DEP/3dep_prodserv.html The data is kind of buried, but I went through this process for building maps and it appears to be very high quality.
- dougbinks 11y agoFormat of the data is listed as Arc/Info ASCII Grid (AAIGrid) which is an ASCII Esri grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esri_grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esri_grid.
- tibbon 11y agoCould do some neat things with drone piloting with this.
- cwal37 11y agoIf you're interested in LiDAR data from the United states, you should have a look at this wikipedia page and its corresponding links[0]. Most states have some kind of data freely available from the most recent survey, although it's neither uniform or always clear in terms of how to access it. The structure of the program allowed individual states to tackle their won territory differently in both surveying and data dissemination, so there's no easy and official central repo as far as I understand. I was in grad school at Indiana and working at the geological survey while they were finalizing some of the state's pieces of this, and it was really fascinating to see some of the early products some of the people in the geography and geology departments were producing. I mucked around a bit with it myself, but never really produced anything useful. I can speak to finding the data fairly easy to acquire and quite comprehensive at the time, uncertain if that's changed, but might be a decent starting point[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lidar_Dataset_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lidar_Dataset_(United... [1] http://gis.iu.edu/datasetInfo/statewide/in_2011.php http://gis.iu.edu/datasetInfo/statewide/in_2011.php
- deskamess 11y agoAny idea about the cost of doing a LIDAR scan for a region? Lets say you have 1200 square km (assume rectangular area). How much would that cost?
- vanous 11y agoDoes anyone know of publicly available LIDAR data for the Czech Republic?
- Animats 11y agoDo they have "first and last" LIDAR data, or just one value per point? It's common to capture the distance to both the first and the last reflection. This often indicates the top of vegetation and the ground level. With that, you can easily identify trees, brush, and crops.
- tgb 11y agoNeat. I was wondering about that.
- Schwolop 11y agoAt one point in time[1], I hired a helicopter to act as a surrogate remote sensor doing data fusion with a ground robot. I flew as a passenger and told the pilot where to fly based on the ground robot's need for data. Since we had to pay for the helicopter's time anyway, and the field trial was spread over two days, we left our equipment attached to the helicopter when it returned to its airfield that night. The next day we had a 78km long data set of LIDAR, GPS, visual imaging, and inertial measures, all from an altitude of about 25m giving us about +/- 2mm for the LIDAR's range data. The sad end to this anecdote is that I have no idea what happened to that data. It's presumably sitting on a dusty server somewhere in academia. [1] This point in time, as it happens: http://www.drtomallen.com/uploads/1/2/0/2/12026356/3361016_orig.jpg http://www.drtomallen.com/uploads/1/2/0/2/12026356/3361016_o...