USGS 3DEP LiDAR Point Clouds

Contents

Project Description

This AWS Public Dataset project is about processing the USGS 3DEP LiDAR point cloud data into a form that is cloud-friendly, streamable, lossless, and convenient.

The main landing page on AWS for the project is at https://registry.opendata.aws/usgs-lidar/

Public 3DEP LiDAR data is available in two forms on AWS:

1. A Requester Pays bucket at s3://usgs-lidar containing many of the USGS resources available as full-density LASzip tiles
2. A public access bucket at s3://usgs-lidar-public containing EPT resources mirroring many (but not all) of the resources in #1.

Entwine

A description of the EPT format, which is a hierarchical format arranged by progressive level-of-detail, is contained at https://entwine.io/entwine-point-tile.html. EPT was chosen as the service mechanism for this data due to its scalability potential to trillions of points, flexibility, and its ease of use via open source infrastructure like PDAL, LASzip, Potree, and Plasio.js.

To generate EPT datasets for your own data with Entwine, visit the quickstart and browse the configuration documentation for more advanced usage.

Processing

Data processing with Entwine was performed on AWS EC2 c5d.9xlarge instances using S3 for output storage. Currently, there are more than 10 trillion LiDAR points available in over 950 distinct resources.

Visualization

The point cloud data may be visualized with Potree or Plasio.js via the index at http://usgs.entwine.io.

Coordinate System

The EPT data is accessible via EPSG:3857 for ease of web usage - with PDAL the data can be reprojected on the fly with the reprojection filter which can be used in combination with other processing pipeline stages.

The EPT reader within PDAL may also be used to select areas of data for use locally.

Resource Links

• Entwine
• PDAL readers.ept
• Potree
• Plasio.js

Support

Thank you to the multiple organizations that have supported the development of the USGS 3DEP LiDAR dataset.

USACE CRREL

The US Army Corps of Engineers Remote Sensing / GIS Center of Expertise at CRREL sponsored the processing and development of the AWS 3DEP Public Dataset in multiple ways. First, it sponsored the development and continuing support of PDAL and Entwine open source software libraries, which were used to process and manage the data. Second, it supported the processing and management of the 3DEP data to an Entwine Point Tiles public dataset.

Amazon Web Services Public Datasets Team

The AWS Public Datasets Team supported the effort by providing processing and storage grants for the development of the EPT data and ongoing support by making access to that data publicly available.

Hobu, Inc.

Connor Manning from Hobu, Inc. constructed the 3DEP EPT resources with cloud processing and management tools from Hobu, Inc..