Get the approximate point and pulse density of LAS files

get_density() calculates the approximate average point and pulse (first/last-return only) density of LAS files.

Usage

get_density(path, full.names = FALSE)

Arguments

path

The path to a file (.las/.laz/.copc), to a directory which contains these files, or to a virtual point cloud (.vpc) referencing these files.

full.names

Whether to return the full file path or just the file name (default)

Value

A dataframe returning filename, npoints, npulses, area, pointdensity, pulsedensity

Details

For this function only the header from LAS files is read and density is calculated based on the bounding box of the data file and the number of points of first-returns. This does not take into account if parts of the bounding box are missing data, and hence this density does not reflect the density as it is calculates by e.g. lidR. However, it is much faster because it does not read the entire file and density should be approximately the same if the entire bounding box has point data.

Examples

f <- system.file("extdata", package = "managelidar")
get_density(f)
#>                            filename npoints npulses           area
#> 1 3dm_32_547_5724_1_ni_20240327.laz    2936    2606 309656.1 [m^2]
#> 2 3dm_32_547_5725_1_ni_20240327.laz    3369    1340 347095.0 [m^2]
#> 3 3dm_32_548_5724_1_ni_20240327.laz   10000    3426 988760.1 [m^2]
#> 4 3dm_32_548_5725_1_ni_20240327.laz   10000    4247 987443.7 [m^2]
#>          pointdensity        pulsedensity
#> 1 0.009481486 [1/m^2] 0.008415787 [1/m^2]
#> 2 0.009706277 [1/m^2] 0.003860615 [1/m^2]
#> 3 0.010113677 [1/m^2] 0.003464946 [1/m^2]
#> 4 0.010127160 [1/m^2] 0.004301005 [1/m^2]