Tiny Online Tools
Six edits every scan needs, in the right order
A raw scan is rarely usable as delivered. It is too dense, it includes the tripod and the operator, it has noise floating above the roofline, it sits in a projected coordinate system nowhere near the origin, and it arrives split across tiles. This free online point cloud processor does all of that in one pass, in the browser, with nothing uploaded.
What it does
- Merge several LAS, LAZ, PLY, XYZ or PCD clouds into one file
- Crop to a box, or to a range on a single axis — expressed as a percentage of the cloud's own extent, so you can set it before you know the coordinates
- Downsample with a voxel grid (uniform density) or every-Nth thinning (fast preview)
- Remove statistical outliers using the mean distance to each point's k nearest neighbours
- Transform — translate, rotate, scale, or centre on the origin or the ground plane
- Recolour by elevation, by LiDAR intensity, or with one flat colour
Why the order is fixed
The pipeline always runs crop, then downsample, then outlier removal, then transform, then recolour. That is not arbitrary.
Cropping first makes everything after it cheaper, and the crop box is defined against the original bounding box, so it has to be evaluated before anything moves the data. Downsampling before outlier removal matters even more: the statistical test compares each point's neighbour distance against a global average, and that is only meaningful when density is roughly even — which is exactly what voxel downsampling produces. Recolouring runs last because an elevation ramp has to map the final height range.
Removing outliers without removing detail
For every point the tool measures the mean distance to its k nearest neighbours, then drops points beyond mean + ratio × standard deviation. Noise — dust, birds, mixed pixels at depth edges — sits further from its neighbours than surface points do, so it fails the test first.
The ratio is the knob that matters. Around 1.0 is aggressive and will eat thin structures like wires and foliage. 2.0 is a sensible default. 3.0 removes only gross blunders. The result panel reports how many points each stage removed, so you can tune it instead of guessing.
Merging tiles safely
LAS and LAZ files store coordinates in the hundreds of thousands of metres, and each one is recentred on its own bounding box when opened so rendering stays precise. Merging tiles naively would stack them on top of each other; this tool re-offsets every cloud against the first one instead, and reports the offset so you can restore the original coordinate system afterwards.