Finally some really good news out of Saxony. 
After North Rhine-Westphalia and Thuringia released the first significant amounts of open geospatial data in Germany in a one-two punch in January 2017, we now have a third German state opening their entire tax-payer-funded geospatial data holdings to the tax-paying public via a simple and very easy-to-use online download portal. Welcome to the open data party, Saxony!!!
Currently available via the online portal are the LiDAR-derived raster Digital Terrain Model (DTM) at 1 meter resolution (DGM 1m) for everything flown since 2015 and and at 2 meter resolution (DGM 2m) or 20 meter resolution (DGM 20m) for the entire state. The horizontal coordinates use UTM zone 33 with ETRS89 (aka EPSG code 25833) and the vertical coordinate uses the “Deutsche Haupthöhennetz 2016” or “DHHN2016” (aka EPSG code 7837). Also available are orthophotos at 20 cm (!!!) resolution (DOP 20cm).
Overview of current LiDAR holdings. Areas flown 2015 or later have LAS files and 1 meter rasters. Others have LiDAR as ASCII files and lower resolution rasters.
Offline – by ordering through either this online form or that online form – you can also get the 5 meter DTM and the 10 meter DTM, the raw LiDAR point clouds, LiDAR intensity rasters, hill-shaded DTM rasters, as well as the 1 meter and the 2 meter Digital Surface Model (DSM) for a small administrative fee that ranges between 25 EUR and 500 EUR depending on the effort involved.
Our immediate thought is to get a copy on the entire raw LiDAR points clouds (available as LAS 1.2 files for all data acquired since 2015 and as ASCII text for earlier acquisitions) and find some portal willing to hosts this data online. We are already in contact with the land survey of Saxony to discuss this option and/or alternate plans.
Let’s have a look at the data. First we download four 2 km by 2 km tiles of the 1 meter DTM raster for an area surrounding the so called “Greifensteine” using the interactive map of the download portal, which are provided as simple XYZ text. Here a look at the contents of one ot these tiles:
more Greifensteine\333525612_dgm1.xyz 352000 5613999 636.26 352001 5613999 636.27 352002 5613999 636.28 352003 5613999 636.27 352004 5613999 636.24 [...]
Note that the elevation are not sampled in the center of every 1 meter by 1 meter cell but exactly on the full meter coordinate pair, which seems especially common in German-speaking countries. Using txt2las we convert these XYZ rasters to LAZ format and add geo-referencing information for more efficient subsequent processing.
txt2las -i greifensteine\333*_dgm1.xyz ^
-set_scale 1 1 0.01 ^
-epsg 25833 ^
-olaz
Below you see that going from XYZ to LAZ reduces the amount of data from 366 MB to 10.4 MB, meaning that the data on disk becomes over 35 times smaller. The ability of LASzip to compress elevation rasters was first noted during the search for missing airliner MH370 and resulted in our new LAZ-based compressor for height grid called DEMzip. The resulting LAZ files now also include geo-referencing information.
96,000,000 333525610_dgm1.xyz 96,000,000 333525612_dgm1.xyz 96,000,000 333545610_dgm1.xyz 96,000,000 333545612_dgm1.xyz 384,000,000 bytes 2,684,820 333525610_dgm1.laz 2,590,516 333525612_dgm1.laz 2,853,851 333545610_dgm1.laz 2,795,430 333545612_dgm1.laz 10,924,617 bytes
Using blast2dem we then create a hill-shaded version of the 1 meter DTM in order to overlay a visual representation of the DTM onto Google Earth.
blast2dem -i greifensteine\333*_dgm1.laz ^
-merged ^
-step 1 ^
-hillshade ^
-o greifensteine.png
Below the result that nicely shows how the penetrating laser of the LiDAR allows us to strip away the forest to see interesting geological features in the bare-earth terrain.
In a second exercise we use the available RGB orthophoto images to color one of the DTM tiles and explore it using lasview. For this we download the image for the top left of the four tiles that covers the area containing the “Greifensteine” from the interactive download portal for orthophotos. As the resolution of the TIF image is 20 cm and that of the DTM is only 1 meter, we first down-sample the TIF using gdalwarp of GDAL.
gdalwarp -tr 1 1 ^
-r cubic ^
greifensteine\dop20c_33352_5612.tif ^
greifensteine\dop1m_33352_5612.tif
If you are not yet using GDAL today is a good day to start. It nicely complements the point cloud processing functionality of LAStools for raster inputs. Next we use lascolor to give each elevation pixel of the DTM stored in LAZ format its corresponding color from the orthophoto.
lascolor -i greifensteine\333525612_dgm1.laz ^
-image greifensteine\dop1m_33352_5612.tif ^
-odix _rgb -olaz
Now we can view the colored DTM in LAZ format interactively with lasview or any other LiDAR viewing software and turn on the RGB colors from the orthophoto as needed to understand the scene.
lasview -i greifensteine\333525612_dgm1_rgb.laz
We thank the “Staatsbetrieb Geobasisinformation und Vermessung Sachsen (GeoSN)” for giving us easy access to the 1 meter DTM and the 20 cm orthophoto that we have used in this article through their new open geodata portal as open data under the user-friendly license “Datenlizenz Deutschland – Namensnennung – Version 2.0.
