Multithreaded approach for lossless LiDAR data compression

Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) has the capability of capturing a huge amount of highly accurate spatial data. However, the size of the data causes a lot of problems associated with its exchange and storage. In this paper, a method for lossless LiDAR data compression is presented. Although, efficient methods in terms of compression ratio have already been proposed, their time efficiency can be improved. For this purpose, a multithreading schema was developed to increase the use of the computer resources (i.e. multi-core central processor unit and direct memory access). In this way, the overall compression time has been reduced over 70%.