A general-purpose framework for parallel processing of large-scale LiDAR data

ABSTRACT

Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data are essential for scientific discoveries such as Earth and ecological sciences, environmental applications, and responding to natural disasters. While collecting LiDAR data over large areas is quite possible the subsequent processing steps typically involve large computational demands. Efficiently storing, managing, and processing LiDAR data are the prerequisite steps for enabling these LiDAR-based applications. However, handling LiDAR data poses grand geoprocessing challenges due to data and computational intensity. To tackle such challenges, we developed a general-purpose scalable framework coupled with a sophisticated data decomposition and parallelization strategy to efficiently handle ‘big’ LiDAR data collections. The contributions of this research were (1) a tile-based spatial index to manage big LiDAR data in the scalable and fault-tolerable Hadoop distributed file system, (2) two spatial decomposition techniques to enable efficient parallelization of different types of LiDAR processing tasks, and (3) by coupling existing LiDAR processing tools with Hadoop, a variety of LiDAR data processing tasks can be conducted in parallel in a highly scalable distributed computing environment using an online geoprocessing application. A proof-of-concept prototype is presented here to demonstrate the feasibility, performance, and scalability of the proposed framework.

KEYWORDS:

• Big data
• online geoprocessing
• Hadoop MapReduce
• spatial decomposition
• LAStools
• parallel

Acknowledgements

We thank the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments that greatly improved the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Zhenlong Li http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8938-5466

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by University of South Carolina through the ASPIRE (Advanced Support for Innovative Research Excellence) program [13540-16-41796]. Additional funding was provided by the South Carolina Department of Transportation under contract to the University of South Carolina [SPR #707 or USC 13540FB11], USGS [G15AC00085], and NSF-BCS [1455349].