Lossless Compression of Harris Geiger-Mode LiDAR Data in GeoExpress

SEATTLE, Wash. — December 13, 2016 — LizardTech®, a provider of software solutions for managing and distributing geospatial content, has unveiled lossless compression of Harris Geiger-Mode LiDAR data in the newest release of its GeoExpress software. Users of GeoExpress 9.5.3 can now convert massive Geiger-Mode point clouds directly from their native Binary Point File (BPF) format to industry-standard MrSID files without losing data.

“Direct conversion from BPF enables GeoExpress clients to fully leverage the rich information content of Geiger-Mode LiDAR data sets,” said Terry Ryan, LizardTech Federal Government Sales Manager. “In addition, the compressed files are easier to process, archive and share.”

Harris has provided airborne Geiger-Mode LiDAR data to the U.S. government for two decades and recently rolled the technology out to the commercial sector for a variety of large-area mapping applications. Geiger-Mode employs a multi-angle illumination method to capture extremely dense point clouds of the Earth’s surface. Compared to traditional LiDAR, Geiger Mode offers higher resolution and greater information content, but in much larger data sets.

BPF is the native format used for raw Geiger-Mode data because it readily accommodates enormous files with multiple metadata and attribute fields. However, the BPF format is not supported by most commercial LiDAR processing software packages. As a result, Geiger-Mode customers had to convert BPF to the more common LAS format for generation of surface models, digital elevation models and other map products. This BPF-to-LAS conversion was time consuming and lost data in the process.

GeoExpress 9.5.3 eliminates the intermediary step of converting to LAS and compresses directly to MrSID files, which can be easily processed by all commercial LiDAR software packages.

“The full information content of the Geiger-Mode LiDAR data is retained, and processing time is reduced with GeoExpress 9.5.3,” said Ryan.

GeoExpress is LizardTech’s flagship software product, enabling geospatial professionals to manipulate digital image and LiDAR data sets and compress them to MrSID or JPEG2000 files for cost-effective processing, storage and transmission. In addition to the new Geiger-Mode handling capabilities, GeoExpress 9.5.3 offers other enhancements, including advanced color balancing, default RGB transformation and easier licensing.

A free trial of GeoExpress 9.5.3 is available on-line.