Pielach River research dataset October 2024 - Mapping shallow inland running waters with UAV-borne photo and laser bathymetry

About the dataset:

The data provided in this repository contains laser scans, a water surface model, images, and reference points acquired on Oct, 24-25, 2024 at the Pielach River (Lower Austria). The data consists of UAV-borne topographic and topo-bathymetric 3D LiDAR point clouds, control and check points captured via terrestrial survey with a  total  station and RTK-GNSS, and UAV-images. The laser point clouds are fully processed for a subset of the entire dataset and provided in standard LAZ file format. In addition, the full LiDAR point clouds of the individual flight strips are provided in as raw point clouds (geo-references, unclassified, no refraction correction for underwater points).   Furthermore, the dataset contains UAV nadir and oblique images stored in JPG format.

Context and methodology

• Research domain: Environmental sciences, Hydrography, Terrain Mapping
• The data set is intended as a benchmark for optical hydrography based on images and laser scans.
• Ground truth data is available in form of terrestrially measured reference points on land and under water.
• The data was collected between October 24-25, 2025 at the Pielach River near Loosdorf, Austria.
• All images and laser scans were acquired with Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAV) as carrier platforms.

Technical details

• The laser scan data are stored LAS/LAZ format as geo-referenced 3D point clouds. Both post-processed and original strip data are available.
• The image data are stored in JPG format and contain (i) nadir and oblique images, (ii) stereo image sequences, (iii) synchronized stereo oblique images. 
• The water surface of the Pielach river is provided in GeoTIFF format.
• Reference data are stored as 3D points in ASCII (cvs) format. Reference points are available both on land and under water.
• The data are provided in 11 subfolders: laser scans (4), water surface model (1), reference points (3), images (3). Each folder contains a separate readme.txt file with further information of the folder's content
• The following software was used for processing the data:
  • RIEGL RiPROCESS (manufacturer's software, laser data pre-processing) 
  • OPALS (Orientation and Processing of Airborne Laser Scanning data) developed at TU Wien
  • CloudCompare (visualization/editing of 3D point clouds)
  • Pix4Dsurvey (point cloud labelling)
  • Agisoft Metashape, Pix4D Mapper, ESRI/nFrames SURE (image data processing)
  • Nerfstudio 
  • proprietary research software developed in MATLAB and, Python

Corresponding article:

Details concerning the study area the sensors used and the data processing can be found in:

Mandlburger et al., 2025: Mapping shallow inland running waters with UAV-borne photo and laser bathymetry - The Pielach River showcase. Journal of Applied Hydrography, 130(06) 42-55, DOI: 10.23784/HN130-06.