New binary data exchange format is intended to serve as an industry standard for the exchange of lidar data among manufacturers, data providers and end users.

ASPRS announced the approval and official release of the ASPRS Lidar Data Exchange Format Standard at its recent 69th Annual ASPRS Conference and Exhibition held in Anchorage, Alaska in May. This new binary data exchange format is intended to serve as an industry standard for the exchange of lidar data between various hardware manufacturers, software developers, data providers and end users. It was originally developed by a consortium of industry partners (Z/I Imaging, EnerQuest, Sanborn, US Army Corps of Engineers, Optech and Leica GeoSystems) and is intended to make the exchange, manipulation, analysis and storage of lidar data faster and easier.

The new binary data exchange format is a public binary file format that is a replacement for the proprietary systems or a generic ASCII file interchange system used by many companies in the past. A problem with proprietary systems is that data cannot be taken easily from one system or process flow to another and the file sizes can be extremely large, even for small amounts of data. In addition, a standardized lidar data format will facilitate the processing, editing and visualization of lidar data in a wide variety of commercial and proprietary software packages, as well as the efficient exchange of data between data providers and end-users. The standard is an expandable format, which can be modified to accommodate future develop- ments of lidar technology. The standard is available at http://www.asprs.org/resources.html, click on Standards.