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US NAVY Sonar/Lidar Editing Software Released To the World
New submitter PFMABE writes The Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVO) has spent 16 years developing the Pure File Magic Area Based Editor (PFMABE) software suite to edit the huge volumes of lidar and sonar data they collect every year. In accordance with 17 USC 105, copyright protection is not available to any work of the US government. Originally developed to run on RedHat OS with network distributed storage, it has been migrated to Windows 7. This software, and accompanying source code (Win & Linux), has been released to the public domain at pfmabe.software, free for download with registration.
Interested parties should also check out MB-System; it's GPL and NSF
funded. If you are familiar with GMT mapping tools this will be right
up your alley. Supposidly there's a Windows build using Cygwin, but with
datasets this large why would you want to?
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/r...
It is ainly focused on multibeam bathymetry but it despite the name it does
sidescan sonar processing too. It's not set up for LiDAR but its scripts
for dealing with massive point clouds could be adaptable.
Editing Lidar data and binning surfaces seems useful to all sorts of things Lidary, not just the underwater world. If this software can handle large data sets than it could be useful in detecting and tagging objects in a terrestrial scan. Scan large areas, add a database, and this becomes an open source "big data" Lidar tool.
If this software can't handle large data sets, then who cares beside Sponge Bob, PhD?
Annoying that this source code has been released in this way. But it is open source as public domain, which mean open season on the code base. If it is worth a damn, I'm sure someone will distribute as a proper open source project soon enough.
Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.