A list of GIS software and libraries

Various open source software libraries and utilities that can be useful for geospatial vision applications.

The ones that we use and recommend are marked with a .


Databases

PostGIS
Spatial extensions for PostgreSQL

Geometry

Boost.geometry
Various geometric datatypes and algorithms

CGAL (Computational Geometry Algorithms Library)
Robust geometric operations, including many packages for convex hulls, meshes, triangulations, polygon and polyhedron operations, etc.

GEOS (Geometry Engine - Open Source)
Spatial operations, including validation and topology functions

GTS (GNU Triangulated Surface Library)
Triangulations and surface operations

Hull
Convex hulls and triangulations

NormFet
Normals and feature sizes in point clouds

PCL (Point Cloud Library)
2D/3D image and point cloud processing

Qhull
n-D approximate convex hulls and triangulations

TetGen
Tetrahedral meshes

Triangle
Very fast 2D (constrained) Delaunay triangulations

Graphs

Input and Output

Assimp
Import various 3D model formats, such as OBJ and COLLADA. C++ and Python.

Fiona
OGR Python bindings

GeoTIFF
GeoTIFF format

laspy
Read/write LAS with Python

LAStools/LASlib
Point cloud I/O and processing

Rasterio
GDAL Python bindings

Spatial indexing

Visualisation

CloudCompare
3D point cloud and mesh processing software

GRASS
GIS package

LidarViewer
Interactive visualisation of massive point clouds

MeshLab
Process and view triangular meshes and point clouds

plasio
Web-based LAS/LAZ point cloud viewer

Potree
Web-based viewer for massive point clouds

QGIS (Quantum GIS)
GIS package