u/nico579 — reddlx

▲ 51 r/OsmAnd

Update: lidar2map, free offline LiDAR terrain maps for OsmAnd, now covers 20+ countries

A month ago I posted about lidar2map, a free open-source tool (GPL) that

turns public LiDAR data into offline relief maps for OsmAnd. Back then it

only covered France. Quick update, since the coverage is now 30+ official

sources in 20+ countries:

- Germany: Bavaria, NRW, Lower Saxony, Thuringia (1 m)

- Austria: Tyrol and East Tyrol (0.5 m)

- Switzerland, Czechia, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium (Flanders)

- UK (England, Scotland, Wales) and Ireland

- Norway, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Poland, Slovenia, Spain

- US (3DEP), Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand

You pick a town or a bounding box, the tool downloads the official national

LiDAR tiles and computes visualizations that reveal micro-terrain invisible

on satellite or standard maps: old paths, terraces, earthworks, drainage,

charcoal kilns. Output is a .sqlitedb or MBTiles file you drop into OsmAnd

and use fully offline in the field.

Also new since the first post: a small GUI (no command line needed),

presets that auto-tune the visualization to each source's resolution, and

a compressed tile cache (about half the disk space).

Free, GPL, Windows/macOS/Linux: https://github.com/nico579/lidar2map/releases

If you try it on your country's data, feedback is very welcome, especially

on how the maps render in OsmAnd in the field.

u/nico579 — 5 days ago

▲ 18 r/gis

Update: my open-source LiDAR→offline-map tool now covers 20 countries (was 6), plus new archaeological relief algorithms

https://preview.redd.it/yb7hydkhhv6h1.png?width=2904&format=png&auto=webp&s=0f74fcae4b89a1e0d6898a7a86188a1d4a8f87cc

https://preview.redd.it/a3vyxl0jhv6h1.png?width=1020&format=png&auto=webp&s=11cb4809027f776fd9cebe0ba6e1551df9a38429

Last time I posted lidar2map (GPLv3) here, it supported LiDAR from 6 countries. Since then it's grown quite a bit, so here's what's new.

Provider coverage: 6 → 20 countries
France (IGN LiDAR HD), Netherlands (AHN4/5), Switzerland (swissALTI3D), Norway (Kartverket), Germany (Bavaria, NRW, Lower Saxony), Austria (Tyrol, Osttirol), UK (England, Wales), Belgium (Flanders), Finland, Denmark, Ireland, Czechia, Slovenia, Estonia, Spain, Poland, USA (3DEP), Canada (HRDEM), New Zealand, Australia (QLD/NSW). All exposed through the same --provider flag / GUI dropdown, and the relief pipeline (SVF, hillshade, etc.) is identical across all of them regardless of native CRS or data format (TMS, WCS, STAC/COG, ArcGIS ImageServer, ATOM/LAZ...).

New relief algorithms for archaeological prospection
On top of multidirectional hillshade and SVF, there's now:

Positive/negative openness (Yokoyama) — crests/mounds in light, ditches/hollow paths in dark
Local Relief Model (LRM) — strips out broad terrain, keeps only local anomalies
Red Relief Image Map (RRIM, Chiba 2008) — slope + LRM composite, hollows and bumps in one glance

Each can be run as a parameterized instance (--shading svf:dist=20,gamma=2 --shading svf:dist=100,gamma=1.5 --shading lrm:sigma=10), so you can stack multiple variants of the same algorithm in one pass — useful for comparing micro-relief vs. larger enclosures without recomputing.

https://github.com/nico579/lidar2map

reddit.com

u/nico579 — 25 days ago

▲ 149 r/LiDAR+2 crossposts

I built an open-source tool that turns national LiDAR (FR/NL/CH/NO) into offline relief maps for your phone

I've been building lidar2map, a standalone Python tool (GPLv3) that downloads public LiDAR from several national portals — IGN (France), AHN (Netherlands), swisstopo (Switzerland), Kartverket (Norway) — computes archaeology-oriented hillshades, and exports offline maps for Locus Map / OsmAnd / TwoNav (MBTiles, RMAP, SQLiteDB, Mapsforge).

The point: under tree/scrub cover, aerial imagery and OSM show nothing. A Sky-View Factor pass on the LiDAR DTM makes dry-stone terraces, old paths and micro-relief pop out. Same extent, three views.

Input is a town name, GPS point, bbox, département or whole region. It also does IGN raster/vector and OSM Mapsforge (France for the IGN layers). Runs on Windows / Linux / macOS, GUI or CLI.

It's a hobby project — feedback welcome, especially on the SVF / LRM / RRIM chains and the tiling. Not intended for metal detecting; exact coordinates of micro-relief are deliberately not published.

https://github.com/nico579/lidar2map

u/nico579 — 1 month ago