Clipping

Often times we want to clip out LiDAR points using a shapefile. This can be done using pyfor’s Cloud.clip method. pyfor integrates with geopandas and shapely, convenient geospatial packages for Python, to provide a way to clip point clouds.

import pyfor
import geopandas

# Load point cloud
pc = pyfor.cloud.Cloud("pyfortest/data/test.las")
pc.plot3d()

As input to the clipping function we need any shapely.geometry.Polygon our heart desires, as long as its coordinates correspond to the same physical space as the Cloud object. Here I extract a Polygon from a shapefile using geopandas:

# Load the polygon
polys = geopandas.read_file("pyfortest/data/clip.shp")
poly = polys["geometry"].iloc[0]

Finally, pass the Polygon to the clipping function. This function returns a new Cloud object.

# Clip the point cloud
clipped = pc.clip(poly)
clipped.plot3d()