[gdal-dev] Does GDAL support ArcInfo Binary Grids with multiple bands?

[Andrew Loughhead]

Jason Roberts wrote:
>
> Is the GDAL ArcInfo Binary Grid (AIG) driver intended to support AIGs 
> with multiple bands? I have a 5-band AIG for which the Python gdal 
> bindings for GDAL 1.6.0 report "`C:\Temp\ccomp2' not recognised as a 
> supported file format." ArcGIS 9.3.1 reports that the "format" of it 
> is "GRID Stack 7.x". It was created using standard ArcGIS tools.
>
I don't think that its quite right to see a GRID stack as an AIG with 
multiple bands. 

 From (somewhat long term) memory an ArcInfo Grid Stack is actually a 
collection of individual grids, rather than a single grid dataset with 
multiple bands.  Within ArcInfo Workstation stacks can be converted to a 
few multiband image formats, and multiband images converted to stacks.  
I *think* that Stacks always have an INFO file, possibly called 
<stackname>.stk, and I also think that the grids composing a stack had 
to have identical bounds, and be in the same workspace.  Any particular 
grid in a workspace could be in zero, one or more stacks.

Anyway I would expect that GDAL will deal fine with the individual grids 
in the stack, as individual datasets.  Any GDAL utility, or binding, 
which can combine individual datasets into a multiband image could 
therefore convert a stack into an image.  Of course you would need to 
know which individual grids form the stack. 

hth
Andrew