I am trying to figure out if ArcGIS is even worth working with to process my point data, or if I should look for another solution and just work with the finished rasters in Arc.
I am generating 1.5 billion point clouds of a 30 km strip of river every few weeks. I chop the river into 5 chunks for processing. I have noise issues with specular reflection from the water (using SfM to generate pointclouds), so I have a mess where the water is. The best way to deal with the mess.. I think.. is to (1) clean up spikes with a median filter, and (2) eliminate areas of high noise/low returns with a combination of statistics. So ideally I would be able to generate a grid for each of the following in the .las file - mean, max, min, count, and stdev.
My .las file stores everything as 1st (or last) return (I forget), and basically only has xyzrgb for each point. I tried to convert a <300 million point cloud to multipoint (actually I am still trying and it's been hours), but I am wondering if I should give up. I can get just about everything (except median, which is actually really important) from lastools, and I think I'll be able to get median, and maybe everything, with GRASS. I'd love to use ArcMap, but I am at a loss where to even start. .las file is 8GB.