CartoHD

CartoHD is a tool for producing large scale and high definition maps from LiDAR data.

Main process steps

Production of 20cm resolution Digital Surface Model (DSM) and Digital Terrain Model (DTM) from LiDAR points. Rough gap filling for no data pixels.
DSM: Computation of hillshading, slope and shadow depth.
DTM: Computation of slope (to detect and show vertical terrain features). Production of contour lines, 1m interval. Classification of the contour lines.
Production of 20cm resolution images of buildings and vegetation areas using LiDAR classification. Application of various morphological operators to extract main patches and eliminate noise.
Vectorisation of the buildings image. Simplification of the building features with douglass-peucker filter.
Cartographic design with software (such as QGIS). Overlay of auxilary vector topographic data from national topographic databases: Cadastral and agriculture parcels, water bodies, transport networks, geographical names, etc.
Suitable scales: 1:500 to 1:5000.

CartoHD is a python process. Input data are LiDAR files in LAZ or LAS format. It requires PDAL and GDAL to be installed as command line programs.

Check PDAL and GDAL are installed as command. Run pdal and ogr2ogr commands (for example) in a command prompt.
Edit the process.py file to specify where the input data are stored and where the output data should be saved, respectivelly under input_lidar_data and under output_folder variables. It is also possible to specify the area of interest bounding box under bounds variable. Leave it to None of False to process the entire dataset.
Run process.py python script.
Use the ouptut files with your favorite GIS/mapping software to apply the style you prefer, and overlay some auxilary topographic data. Some examples of QGIS projects are provided for France and Luxembourg.