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Walnut Gulch 2003 lidar

Walnut Gulch 2003 lidar

Jun 13, 2016

The 2003 Walnut Gulch lidar data were provided to me in an *.all file format which I had never seen before.

As best I can tell, the data are a text file which contain a headerless set of columns and rows with the following information:

PULSE_TIME UTMN UTME Z INTENSITY   UTMN UTME Z INTENSITY

e.g.

324525.207276 12602761.25 3512215.18 1520.50    82 12602761.25 3512215.20 1520.43    82
324525.207306 12602761.18 3512216.26 1520.55    88 12602761.17 3512216.29 1520.47    88
324525.207336 12602761.11 3512217.20 1520.51    95 12602761.11 3512217.22 1520.45    95
324525.207366 12602761.04 3512218.32 1520.46    90 12602761.04 3512218.32 1520.45    90
324525.207396 12602760.97 3512219.36 1520.56    86 12602760.97 3512219.38 1520.51    86
324525.207426 12602760.91 3512220.31 1520.54    85 12602760.91 3512220.33 1520.46    85
324525.207456 12602760.85 3512221.31 1520.39    93 12602760.85 3512221.30 1520.42    93
324525.207486 12602760.78 3512222.34 1520.60    86 12602760.78 3512222.35 1520.57    86
324525.207516 12602760.72 3512223.27 1520.60    99 12602760.72 3512223.30 1520.51    99

I tried using macro functions in Notepad++, TextPad, and SublimeText 3 to move the block files around (up to 6 million rows per file) but unfortunately the macro command kept failing.

I moved over to Matlab and used textscan 

fileID = fopen('str1.out');
formatSpec = '%f %f %f %f %d %f %f %f %d';
format long g
D=textscan(fileID,formatSpec,'Delimiter','\t');
gps_time = double(D{1,1});
row1_x = D{1,2};
row1_y = D{1,3};
row1_z = D{1,4};
row1_i = double(D{1,5});
row2_x = D{1,6};
row2_y = D{1,7};
row2_z = D{1,8};
row2_i = double(D{1,9});
row_1 = [gps_time row1_x row1_y row1_z row1_i];
row_2 = [gps_time row2_x row2_y row2_z row2_i];
str1 = vertcat(row_1,row_2);
size_id = 1:size(str1);
size_id = size_id';
data = [size_id str1];
col_header={'ID','X','Y','Z','INT'};
dlmwrite('F:\WGEW_2003_LiDAR\str1.csv',col_header);
dlmwrite('F:\WGEW_2003_LiDAR\str1.csv',data,'precision','%10.2f','-append');
clear

I repeated this process for all of the files in the folder (*.out, *.all)