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| Author: | Mateusz Loskot |
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| Contact: | mateusz at loskot dot net |
This article is dedicate to tools, techniques and algorithms useful to create convex hull of cloud of points serialized in LAS file. You can find samples at http://liblas.org/samples to play with.
Calculation of convex hull of points stored in LAS file using Qhull program involves two steps:
The ‘qhull’ accepts plain text input that consists of basic 3 blocks:
It is possible to use las2txt and basic command line utilities available in every Unix system to generate all the three blocks and output them together in required format:
$ las2txt --stdout --parse xyz cloud.las > points.txt
$ cat points.txt | wc -l > count.txt
$ echo "3" > dimension.txt
$ cat dimension.txt count.txt points.txt > qhull_input.txt
$ head -n4 qhull_input.txt
3
213093
630499.95 4834749.17 62.15
630499.83 4834748.88 62.68
Now, file ‘qhull_input.txt’ is ready to use with ‘qhull’ program:
$ qhull s < qhull_input.txt
Convex hull of 213093 points in 3-d:
Number of vertices: 149
Number of facets: 282
Number of non-simplicial facets: 4
Statistics for: | qhull s
Number of points processed: 172
Number of hyperplanes created: 795
Number of distance tests for qhull: 2430368
Number of distance tests for merging: 3484
Number of distance tests for checking: 3890
Number of merged facets: 12
CPU seconds to compute hull (after input): 0.07
and output calculated actual convex hull geometry:
$ qhull s n TO qhull.txt < qhull_input.txt
Alternatively, one may need to output LAS file to qhull input format using Python script or C++ program. Here is example of how to do program it in C++ using libLAS reader and iterator:
// stream operator formatting LASPoint coordiantes, necessary to inject it to liblas namespace
namespace liblas {
std::ostream& operator << (std::ostream& os, liblas::LASPoint const& point)
{
return os << point[0] << '\t' << point[1] << '\t' << point[2] << '\t';
}
}
// open input data reader
std::ifstream ifs("cloud.las", std::ios::in | std::ios::binary);
liblas::LASReader reader(ifs);
// open file for output
std::ofstream ofs("qhull_input.txt");
ofs << "3\n"; // dimension block
ofs << dimension << reader.GetHeader().GetPointRecordsCount() << std::endl; // number of points block
// point coordinates
ofs << std::setiosflags(std::ios::fixed) << std::setprecision(6);
std::copy(liblas::lasreader_iterator(reader), liblas::lasreader_iterator(),
std::ostream_iterator<liblas::LASPoint>(ofs, "\n"));