Airborne LIDAR Data Manipulation and Visualization for Forestry Application
lidR is an open-source R package tailored for research and development, originally developed at Laval University. It allows for the handy manipulation of LiDAR data within the R programming language. It has been widely used for ten years by universities globally and has been cited in more than 1,000 scientific articles.
lidR is preliminarily designed for us to offer R&D services and provide customers an easy and cross-platform way to get access to our work. Users are free to use as they see fit.
How do we leverage lidR?
While lidR is a fully functional and well-documented software used by thousands of users, it is primarily designed for us as an environment to develop custom tools. Over the years, we have created tools such as lake segmentation and mapping, tree detection and counting, road segmentation and mapping, and bridge segmentation. These tools are not all included in lidR, but they have been shared with our customers. Some of them are also openly available on GitHub.
Processing
We can either process your data for you or write the code that enables you to efficiently process it yourself.
Development
We can design specific tools tailored to your needs and implement your ideas such as a customized mobile laser scanning sampling method or bespoke metrics for an area-based approach.
Cross-platform
Everything developed within lidR is thoroughly tested and can be seamlessly installed on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Target users
lidR is a top-tier tool for testing, trying, exploring, and playing with LiDAR data easily in a research and development context. It was designed to provide tools for developing new ideas, creating new processing pipelines, and testing methods in academic research. While it targets users of the R programming language, it can be used with little knowledge of R.
Features
lidR is feature-rich and includes Digital Terrain Models, Digital Surface Models, Individual Tree Segmentation, Crown Delineation, file management, ground classification, noise classification, sensor tracking, a versatile rasterization engine, and many other tools for LiDAR data processing. See the gallery below.
Scientific publications
According to Google Scholar, the lidR package has been cited by more than 1,000 scientific publications. In 2020, we wrote a scientific publication about lidR.
Book
We wrote a comprehensive and free online book about LiDAR data processing with the lidR package. This guide has been written to help both LiDAR novices and seasoned point cloud processing veterans.
Documentation
Being an R package, lidR adheres to the high-quality standards imposed by the CRAN and is thoroughly documented with copy-pastable examples and embedded datasets, just like any other high-quality R package.
Pricing
lidR is free and open source. It costs nothing, and this will never change. We offer services, consulting, and training courses, but our software is free of charge and free to use for any application you see fit. To sustain development, we offer services, but you can also sponsor us.
