LidarBathySeg: an open-source python software for water surface–seabed segmentation from airborne laser bathymetry

LidarBathySeg is an open-source Python application developed for segmentation of water-surface and seabed points in Airborne Laser Bathymetry (ALB) data. The workflow is based on Gaussian mixture analysis, local chunk-based statistics, and an optional SVM refinement step to improve class separation. The method is unsupervised and does not require manually prepared training datasets. Instead, the segmentation is derived directly from the spatial structure and vertical distribution of the point cloud. The software introduces an adaptive chunk-selection procedure designed for datasets acquired under different environmental and sensor conditions. The package includes tools for preprocessing, visualization, statistical analysis, and export of classified point clouds in LAS/LAZ format. Owing to its modular structure, LidarBathySeg can also be integrated with external environments such as PDAL, QGIS, and CloudCompare for further analysis and visualization of bathymetric LiDAR data.