Georeference Point Cloud

SeanMoran

Create an ArcGIS Pro tool to georeference a point cloud (e.g. *.las), similar to the ArcGIS Desktop (Raster) Georeference toolbar or (Vector) Spatial Adjustment toolbar. Localized point clouds on a simple Cartesian coordinate system are becoming more common. An ArcGIS Pro tool to georeference a point cloud would allow you to select control points that link locations in the point cloud with geoferenced locations and then transform the point cloud.

Anonymous User · ‎01-14-2019

I realise it is a bit of a necropost, but I wholeheartedly support this idea. My company (a DSO, re. my previous post about wanting to use a LEICA lidar format in ArcGIS...) recently started "scanning in" our assets, and as a company using both GIS and BIM extensively, the bridge isn't just important, in this transition, LIDAR is as well for us. We're really really growing (with limited staff...) hard to facilitate this, and though we finally managed to get someone to dump the Leica format as PTS file (which through a lot of external tools could be LAS-ified... also a thing that could be done by ArcGIS itself!), it's still a "local" CRS for just said scanned in station, for instance.

Although I can run tools like "rasterise LAS" just fine and georeference the raster, that sadly doesn't help us with the exact LIDAR itself... ideally we'd georeference that just as much. The dataset is rather complex, being terrestial lidar capturing both the inside and outside of a complicated multi-layered installation, that's only to be expected, but although large and cumbersome: georeferencing should be very possible.

RIght now the only steps I know to take are abusing an older version of the LAS format, and abusing the fact it in essence uses similar referencing as GEOTIFF, but it should not be neccesary to do so much... reverse engineering on already cumbersome (50GiB) files... and we got ~1000 of those to process... (fortunately the processing itself shrinks them considerably...)