Visualizing LIDAR in Google Earth

We describe a set of streaming tools that allow quick visualization of large amounts of LIDAR data in Google Earth. We have found these tools useful to rapidly understand and verify the coverage of acquired data or to easily present this data to a wider audience within a popular geospatial context. Starting from raw LIDAR files we use a streaming geometry processing pipeline to turn millions or even billions of LIDAR points into tiled and georeferenced KML files. The generated KML files can either contain elevation contours or image overlays showing color-coded elevation or hillside-shaded terrain. For Gilmer county, for example, we create a 10 by 8 tiling of 2000 meter tiles containing 10 meter contours in KML format. We do this in only 20 minutes using less than 100 MB of main memory and no temporary disk space on a houshold laptop starting from 357 LAS files that contain a total of 3GB of data which represents a total of 156 million LIDAR points. All the tools described in this report including the full source code are documented and available from the author´s website.