PDAL - Point Data Abstraction Library

PDAL logo

PDAL is a C++ library for translating and manipulating point cloud data. It is very much like the GDAL library which handles raster and vector data. The About page provides high level overview of the library and its philosophy. Visit Readers and Writers to list data formats it supports, and see Filters for filtering operations that you can apply with PDAL.

In addition to the library code, PDAL provides a suite of command-line applications that users can conveniently use to process, filter, translate, and query point cloud data. Applications provides more information on that topic.

Finally, PDAL speaks Python by both embedding and extending it. Visit Python to find out how you can use PDAL with Python to process point cloud data.

The entire website is available as a single PDF at http://pdal.io/_/downloads/en/latest/pdf/

News

02-05-2024

PDAL 2.6.3 was released. Visit Download to grab a copy.

08-18-2023

PDAL 2.5.6 was released. Visit Download to grab a copy.

01-13-2023

PDAL 2.5.0 was released. Visit Download to grab a copy. See it in action in Jupyter by visiting Google Colab at https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1JQpcVFFJYMrJCfodqP4Nc_B0_w6p5WOV?usp=sharing

06-28-2021

Howard Butler of Hobu, Inc. was recently interviewed by the MapScaping Podcast. Listen to the episode where he talks about PDAL and point cloud processing.

https://mapscaping.com/blogs/the-mapscaping-podcast/pdal-point-data-abstraction-library

05-19-2021

PDAL 2.2.1 has been released. You can download the source code or follow the quickstart to get going in a hurry with Conda.

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