Introduction

HELIOS (Heidelberg LIDAR Operations Simulator) is a general-purpose Python package for simulation of terrestrial, mobile and airborne laser scanning surveys written in C++11. It is developed and maintained by the 3DGeo Research Group at Heidelberg University.

This documentation contains the full HELIOS documentation, including API references and notebook-based examples. For project usage details, installation instructions, and extended background material, see the repository README.md at https://github.com/3dgeo-heidelberg/helios.

Official website: https://uni-heidelberg.de/helios

Virtual laser scanning — Concept of virtual laser scanning (modified from Winiwarter et al., 2022).

Installation

Conda installation

The recommended way to install HELIOS is via the conda package manager. As conda installer, we recommend mamba, micromamba, or miniconda.

HELIOS can then be installed with:

conda install -c conda-forge helios

Standalone Installer

You can also install HELIOS via the standalone installers available for Windows, Linux and MacOS. They will not only install HELIOS but also add shortcuts for a) a HELIOS terminal session and b) a HELIOS Jupyter session.

Download the correct installer for your operating system from the release page and run it (under Windows, this is a setup wizard, under Linux and MacOS, it is a shell script).

Development installation

If you intend to contribute to the development of HELIOS, we recommend a locally compiled version using these instructions:

git clone https://github.com/3dgeo-heidelberg/helios.git
cd helios
conda env create -f environment-dev.yml
conda activate helios-dev

# On Linux, the following line is recommended, to go with a Conda-provided compiler.
# We had issues with incompatible system compilers before.
conda install -c conda-forge gcc gxx

python -m pip install --no-build-isolation --config-settings=build-dir="build" -v -e .

This will install the HELIOS Python package in editable mode and expose the CMake build directory used as build (adapt as needed). Additional CMake variables can be passed with e.g. --config-settings=cmake.define.BUILD_TESTING="ON".

How to cite HELIOS

If you use HELIOS in your research, please cite

Höfle B., Weiser H., Kapitan D., Kempf D. (2026). HELIOS (version 3.0.0). DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4452870 URL: https://github.com/3dgeo-heidelberg/helios