Basic Information¶
Inspection of file contents
Location determination
Investigate suitability
Printing a Single Point¶
- Purpose:
Verify PDAL is working correctly
Learn about point cloud data types
Familiarize yourself with terminal
Command (first point)¶
In your Conda Shell, issue the following:
1 | pdal info ./exercises/info/interesting.las -p 0
|
pdal
: Run the pdal commandinfo
: info is a “kernel” in PDAL-speak. It is a unit of functionality driven by the command line.
Command (first point)¶
1 | pdal info ./exercises/info/interesting.las -p 0
|
./exercises/info/interesting.las
: File to runinfo
command on-p
: argument corresponds to “print a point”.0
means to print the first (starting from 0)
Printing File Metadata¶
- Purpose:
Investigate files
Verify data validity
Compute bounding box
Retrieve supporting information
Command (metadata)¶
In your Conda Shell, issue the following:
1 | pdal info ./exercises/info/interesting.las --metadata
|
JSON output
Tree structure
Coordinate system
Filter output
Searching Near a Point¶
- Purpose:
Neighborhood query
Point ordering
Command (near - metadata)¶
In your Conda Shell, issue the following:
1 | pdal info ./exercises/info/interesting.las --all | jq .stats.bbox.native.bbox
|
Print all metadata info
Find and compute midpoints from
bbox
metadataQuery file nearest midpoint
Command (near - query)¶
In your Conda Shell, issue the following:
1 | pdal info ./exercises/info/interesting.las --query "637301.20, 851217.57, 496.49/3"
|
Print 3-nearest points (in order)
Output JSON format
Run (near - query )¶

Next¶
On to Translation