R: How do I loop through spatial points with a specific buffer? - r

Question

So my problem is quite difficult to describe so I hope I can make my question as clear as possible.
I use the rLiDAR package to load a .las file into R and afterwards convert it into a SpatialPointsDataFrame using the sp package.
So my SpatialPointsDataFrame is quite dense.
Now I want to define a buffer of 0.5 meters and loop (iterate) with him (the buffer) through the points, choosing always the point with the highest Z value within the buffer, as the next point to jump to.This should be repeated until there isn't any point within the buffer with an higher Z value as the current. All values (or perhaps the X and Y values) of this "found" point should then be written into a list/dataframe and the process should be repeated until all such highest points are found.
Thats the code I got so far:
>library(rLiDAR)
>library(sp)
>rLAS<-readLAS("Test.las",short=FALSE)
>PointCloud<- data.frame(rLAS)
>coordinates(PointCloud) <- c("X", "Y")
Well I googled extensively but I could not find any clues how to proceed further...
I dont even know which packages could be of help, I guess perhaps spatstat as my question would probably go into the spatial point pattern analysis.
Does anyone have some ideas how to archive something like that in R? Or is something like that not possible? (Do I perhaps have to skip to python to make something like this work?)
Help would gladly be appreciated.

Answer 1

If you want to get the set of points which are the local maxima within a 0.5m radius circle around each point, this should work. The gist of it is:
Convert the LAS points to a SpatialPointsDataFrame
Create a buffered polygon set with overlapping polygons
Loop through all buffered polygons and find the desired element within the buffer -- in your case, it's the one with the maximum height.
Code below:
library(rLiDAR)
library(sp)
library(rgeos)
rLAS <- readLAS("Test.las",short=FALSE)
PointCloud <- data.frame(rLAS)
coordinates(PointCloud) <- c("X", "Y")
Finish creating the SpatialPointsDataFrame from the LAS source. I'm assuming the field with the point height is PointCloud$value
pointCloudSpdf <- SpatialPointsDataFrame(data=PointCloud,xy)
Use rgeos library for intersection. It's important to have byid=TRUE or the polygons will get merged where they intersect
bufferedPoints <- gBuffer(pointCloudSpdf,width=0.5,byid=TRUE)
# Save our local maxima state (this will be updated)
localMaxes <- rep(FALSE,nrow(PointCloud))
i=0
for (buff in 1:nrow(bufferedPoint#data)){
i <- i+1
bufPolygons <- bufferedPoints#polygons[[i]]
bufSpPolygons <- SpatialPolygons(list(bufPolygons))
bufSpPolygonDf <-patialPolygonsDataFrame(bufSpPolygons,bufferedPoints#data[i,])
ptsInBuffer <- which(!is.na(over(pointCloudSpdf,spPolygonDf)))
# I'm assuming `value` is the field name containing the point height
localMax <- order(pointCloudSpdf#data$value[ptsInBuffer],decreasing=TRUE)[1]
localMaxes[localMax] <- TRUE
}
localMaxPointCloudDf <- pointCloudSpdf#data[localMaxes,]
Now localMaxPointCloudDf should contain the data from the original points if they are a local maximum. Just a warning -- this isn't going to be super fast if you have a lot of points. If that ends up being a concern you may be smarter about pre-filtering your points using a smaller grid and extract from the raster package.
That would look something like this:
Make the cell size small enough so that each 0.5m buffer will intersect at least 4 raster cells -- err on smaller since we are comparing circles to squares.
library(raster)
numRows <- extent(pointCloudSpdf)#ymax-extent(pointCloudSpdf)#ymin/0.2
numCols <- extent(pointCloudSpdf)#xmax-extent(pointCloudSpdf)#xmin/0.2
emptyRaster <- raster(nrow=numRows,ncol=numCols)
rasterize will create a grid with the maximum value of the given field within a cell. Because of the square/circle mismatch this is only a starting point to filter out obvious non-maxima. After this we will have a raster in which all the local maxima are represented by cells. However, we won't know which cells are maxima in the 0.5m radius and we don't know which point in the original feature layer they came from.
r <- rasterize(pointCloudSpdf,emptyRaster,"value",fun="max")
extract will give us raster values (i.e., the highest value for each cell) that each point intersects. Recall from above that all the local maxima will be in this set, although some values will not be 0.5m radius local maxima.
rasterMaxes <- extract(r,pointCloudSpdf)
To match up the original points with the raster maxes, just subtract the raster value at each point from that point's value. If the value is 0, then the values are the same and we have a point with a potential maximum. Note that at this point we are only merging the points back to the raster -- we will have to throw some of these out because they are "under" a 0.5m radius with a higher local max even though they are the max in their 0.2m x 0.2m cell.
potentialMaxima <- which(pointCloudSpdf#data$value-rasterMaxes==0)
Next, just subset the original SpatialPointsDataFrame and we'll do the more exhaustive and accurate iteration over this subset of points since we should have thrown out a bunch of points which could not have been maxima.
potentialMaximaCoords <- coordinates(pointCloudSpdf#coords[potentialMaxima,])
# using the data.frame() constructor because my example has only one column
potentialMaximaDf <- data.frame(pointCloudSpdf#data[potentialMaxima,])
potentialMaximaSpdf <-SpatialPointsDataFrame(potentialMaximaCoords,potentialMaximaDf)
The rest of the algorithm is the same but we are buffering the smaller dataset and iterating over it:
bufferedPoints <- gBuffer(potentialMaximaSpdf, width=0.5, byid=TRUE)
# Save our local maxima state (this will be updated)
localMaxes <- rep(FALSE, nrow(PointCloud))
i=0
for (buff in 1:nrow(bufferedPoint#data)){
i <- i+1
bufPolygons <- bufferedPoints#polygons[[i]]
bufSpPolygons <- SpatialPolygons(list(bufPolygons))
bufSpPolygonDf <-patialPolygonsDataFrame(bufSpPolygons,bufferedPoints#data[i,])
ptsInBuffer <- which(!is.na(over(pointCloudSpdf, spPolygonDf)))
localMax <- order(pointCloudSpdf#data$value[ptsInBuffer], decreasing=TRUE)[1]
localMaxes[localMax] <- TRUE
}
localMaxPointCloudDf <- pointCloudSpdf#data[localMaxes,]