PulseWaves Full Waveform Lidar Format Released

Just in time for the RIEGL LIDAR 2013 user conference – taking place from 25 to 27 June in Vienna – technology start-up rapidlasso GmbH has released an open data exchange format called 'PulseWaves' for storing full waveform Lidar data. The new format has been in development since December 2011 as a product of transparent discussions at the PulseWaves forum that involved many stakeholders.

The result is a specification simple to implement, yet versatile enough to store many different waveform flavours. PulseWaves standardises storage and delivery for applications that benefit from information about the waveform such as forest management, biomass estimation, and Lidar bathymetry. It complements the ASPRS LAS format for discrete returns and radically simplifies the exchange of full outgoing and returning waveforms.

The initial PulseWaves release comes with an open source reference implementation (LGPL) and a set of basic processing tools to display and convert the data. A compressed version of the PulseWaves format based on LASzip technology is in progress. With their latest release of their RiPROCESS software, RIEGL has become the first hardware vendor to allow exporting full waveform Lidar data to the PulseWaves format. The development effort was in parts supported by RIEGL and by Airborne Research Australia (ARA) at Flinders University in Adelaide.