Import point cloud into PostgreSQL/ pdal pipeline fails

Question

I have a point cloud dataset that I would like to upload to my postgres/postgis database.

I followed this tutorial and I could install everything without problems (on ubuntu 14.04. On ubuntu 12.04 it did not work link), but I have issues to upload the point cloud into my database.

In the tutorial there are some commands to check the lidar metadata. This one is not working in my case: pdal info --input merged.laz --metadata --xml

it says:

Usage error: option '--xml' did not split correctly. Is it in the form --readers.las.option=foo?

pdal generate error when I try to upload the lidar data to the database: pdal pipeline --input laz2pg.xml

PDAL: Couldn't create reader stage of type 'drivers.las.reader'.

The content of my pipeline xml file is the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Pipeline version="1.0">
 <Writer type="drivers.pgpointcloud.writer">
 <Option name="connection">dbname='lidar' user='postgres' host='localhost' port='5432' password='Alibaba22'</Option>
 <Option name="table">test</Option>
 <Option name="srid">27000</Option>
 <Filter type="filters.chipper">
 <Option name="capacity">400</Option>
 <Filter type="filters.cache">
 <Reader type="drivers.las.reader">
 <Option name="filename">merged.laz</Option>
 <Option name="spatialreference">EPSG:27000</Option>
 </Reader>
 </Filter>
 </Filter>
 </Writer>
</Pipeline>

I went trough on this tutorial two times a couple of months ago and it worked, but I have no clue what is wrong now.

Answer 1

Your Reader and Writer types are incorrect. They should be readers.las and writers.pgpointcloud, respectively. The name change happened here: https://github.com/PDAL/PDAL/commit/b7cde7e1fb13f28db1de7797dbb31392db1f7dfc.

You can run pdal --drivers to get a complete list of drivers supported on your system.

• Tamas Kosa: Thanks for your answer. I will be on holidays for two weeks, but I will check it as soon as I'm back.