[Gdal-dev] Rasterization

[Frank Warmerdam]

Markus Reichert wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> For my company, I try to find out what is possible and
> what is not with GDAL/OGR.
> Is it possible to prozess rasterization and
> vectorization with the GDAL/OGR-Library? Which classes
> and APIs are involved in such things?

Markus,

There is no direct support for either within GDAL though I wouldn't
necessarily mind adding limited rasterization support in gdal/alg.  The
MapServer application implements map-generation-oriented rasterization on
top of GDAL and OGR.  OpenEV includes a simple polygon rasterization
algorithm that I would be willing to move into gdal/alg if there was
interest.  This would be useful to use polygons as raster masks for instance
and is what it is used for in OpenEV.

Vectorization is another ball of wax altogether, and not one I am keen to
get into within the confines of GDAL though certainly a vectorization
application could be built over GDAL.  Two modest examples that I might
consider in-scope for GDAL are contour generation (from DEMs for instance),
and raster-to-polygon conversion for classification results for instance
though neither currently exist in GDAL.

Best regards,

-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
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