FullAnalyze: A Research tool for handling, processing and analyzing full-waveform lidar data

Full-waveform (FW) lidar systems provide range profiles of the Earth topography. They are acquired from airborne platforms or from satellites. Many applications derive from the use of such data, from the extraction of 3D point clouds to the inversion of vegetation profiles. Nevertheless, handling range profiles is much more difficult than handling 3D point cloud. The aim of this paper is to present a research tool based on opensource libraries that can process and visualize such data. We focused our work on the implementation on the 2D/3D interface that gives the possibility to visualize the interaction between the lidar electromagnetic waves and the Earth topography. Moreover, this tool integrates several processing steps of FW Lidar data.