How to input LIDAR data in ArcGIS

While I have been so problematic before how to resample my billions of points to have it visualized in 3D and further perform analysis over it, I found out that ArcGIS would be the best solution.

The usual discretization is performed on my data, I scraped out all the noisy points by limiting my range to 5cm o 100m. Now I added another criterion, that is to remove all points below my LIDAR setup. That is to consider theta(horizontal FOV)<90 and theta >270 degrees. That in a way reduced my point cloud into almost 30% of the original. Memory-wise, it was a LUXURY already!

Now for checking the irregularities in the observed point cloud, using the Point File Information Tool is by far the best solution. Using ArcGIS 10.0:

1. Go to 3D analayst tools>Conversion>From File> Point File Information.
2. You will be opt to browse lidar point cloud by File or by Folder. (I suggest that you browse by Folder if you've got more than 10 files.)
3. Now you will be opt for the file format. Since what I did is to manually derive the point cloud from scratch and most of my intensity returns are not so usable due to our observation time at night, I opted using XYZ format instead. The binary LAS format is the mainstream interchange format which is optimized and I guess what's available from available vendors out there. Anyways..
4. Specify the suffix (file extension)  and Coordinate System in case you have any.

 Now I have tested using just the first 200 rotations for checking my point file information.

What the process will give you are the bounding rectangle, the attribute table and the average point spacing contained within one of the attributes. This average point spacing is crucial when you are to load and visualize the point cloud later.

So right clicking the Pt_Spacing field in the attribute table, check the statistics to get the average (MEAN) point spacing.

Now you get to clean your data by looking at the average point spacing, any file that goes too large or too small may be erroneous due to incorrect sampling hence can already be deleted. It's also wise to check on the bounding rectangles to check for inconsistencies.

Next will be the loading of the LIDAR data.

My experience is on the ASCII format xyz data. Here are the steps.
1. > 3D Analyst Tools>Conversion>Ascii 3D to feature class. (Input average point spacing as specified in the Point File Information results. Specify coordinate system, input file format etc. if there's any)
2.  To create a DEM out of your Multipoints, just use >Conversion Tools>To Raster>Points to Raster
      - For the Value Field, use Shape.Z
     -  For the cell assignment type, use MEAN
     -  For the cellsize, use average point spacing *4
3. Export data to GRID or Tif to make your data permanent.

Ok. so now, for my next problem, I found out that my latitude and longitude are being interchanged in plotting. This is quite easy to solve in Matlab through:

M(:,[1, 2, 3])=M(:,[2, 1, 3]);


The matrix M contains columns 1,2,3 as lat,long,ht respectively, what I did is to interchange the columns to plot my cloud of points seamlessly in ArcGIS(ArcMap and ArcScene). Nice results so far.

Here's my sample 200 rotations, meaning 20 second Velodyne LIDAR data. The red triangles are points observed through GPS as traversed by the lidar.

Now my next step is to test the data in a larger scale, I mean for my entire dataset. Let's see what kind of problem will arise next...