Point ABSTraction

This is a point abstraction library, written in Rust, inspired by PDAL, specifically engineered to work with LiDAR data.

Another point abstraction library?

Yup!

pabst aims to be smaller in scope than PDAL. Specifically, where PDAL tries to be a swiss-army knife and includes tools for manipulating and transforming data as well as converting between formats, pabst sticks to data format translation. Thanks to Rust's dependency system, it is much easier to set up and use upstream projects, and so including pabst in your existing toolchain is easier than a similar operation would be in C++ land.

pabst is also more opinionated about the dimensions and formats that it supports. It does not (as of this writing) have any support for formats-via-plugin or extra dimensions, the way that PDAL does. This is because, again, Rust's dependency system makes it much easier to incorporate upstream projects (las-rs for one example) and use them to do the heavy lifting. pabst will never do any actual format conversion itself, it will simply serve as a glue between other upstream libraries.

License

This code is available under the MIT license, available in this source tree.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests, you know the drill.