This tool can be used to create a vector polygon of the bounding box or convex hull of a LiDAR point cloud (i.e. LAS file). If the user specified an input file (input) and output file (output), the tool will calculate the footprint, containing all of the data points, and output this feature to a vector polygon file. If the input and output parameters are left unspecified, the tool will calculate the footprint of every LAS file contained within the working directory and output these features to a single vector polygon file. If this is the desired mode of operation, it is important to specify the working directory (wd) containing the group of LAS files; do not specify the optional input and output parameters in this case. Each polygon in the output vector will contain a LAS_NM field, specifying the source LAS file name, a NUM_PNTS field, containing the number of points within the source file, and Z_MIN and Z_MAX fields, containing the minimum and maximum elevations. This output can therefore be useful to create an index map of a large tiled LiDAR dataset.

By default, this tool identifies the axis-aligned minimum rectangular hull, or bounding box, containing the points in each of the input tiles. If the user specifies the hull flag, the tool will identify the minimum convex hull instead of the bounding box. This option is considerably more computationally intensive and will be a far longer running operation if many tiles are specified as inputs.

A note on LAZ file inputs: While WhiteboxTools does not currently support the reading and writing of the compressed LiDAR format LAZ, it is able to read LAZ file headers. This tool, when run in in the bounding box mode (rather than the convex hull mode), is able to take LAZ input files.

lidar_tile, LayerFootprint, minimum_bounding_box, minimum_convex_hull

Function Signature

def lidar_tile_footprint(self, input_lidar: Optional[Lidar], output_hulls: bool = False) -> Vector: ...

Project Links

WbW Homepage User Manual Support WbW