Prototype for "native LAS 1.4 extension" of LASzip LiDAR Compressor Released

A new feature of the updated LASzip compressor is the ability to selectively decompress of only those attributes of each point that really are needed by the application that is reading the LAZ file. Minimally this will be the x and y coordinate of each point and the return counts, which are sufficient to - for example - calculate the exact extend of the survey area. Most applications will also want to access z coordinate. However, the intensities, the GPS times, the RGB or NIR colors, and the new "Extra Bytes" are often not needed. As the updated LAZ format compresses these different attributes into separate layers, their decompression can then be skipped. Therefore sometimes only 40% of a compressed LAZ file needs to be decompressed to access the coordinates of points with many attributes.

The new LASzip prototype is currently being crowd-tested. Interested parties who already have holdings of LAS 1.4 files with point types 6 to 10 may send an email to rapidlasso to participate in these tests.