[gdal-dev] VRT Derived Bands from Python?

[Antonio Valentino]

Hi Even, hi Knut-Frode,

Il 11/05/2011 20:08, Even Rouault ha scritto:
> Le mercredi 11 mai 2011 11:53:55, Knut-Frode Dagestad a écrit :
>> Hi,
>>
>> Derived Bands of the VRT format seems like a very powerful resource.
>>  From the tutorial (http://www.gdal.org/gdal_vrttut.html) it is clear
>> that the Pixel Functions themselves have to be written in C, which is
>> probably anyway best for performance.
>> I also get the impression that the corresponding VRT files with Derived
>> Bands can only be used by applications written in C/C++, since the Pixel
>> Functions are only available inside the scope of such an application
>> program:
>> http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/2940/gdal-pixel-functions-question
>>
>> Does this mean that Pixel Functions can not be used by command line
>> utilities (e.g. gdalwarp and gdal_translate) or from Python?
> 
> The quick answer is : you can't use VRTDerivedBand from command line
> utilities or Python.
> 
> The long answer is : but of course, as often in situations where you can't, 
> you can... Provided you have a C compiler handy, the workaround here is to 
> benefit from the GDAL plugin mechanism for other purposes than writing a GDAL 
> driver.
> 
> Create a gdalmypixelfunction.c whose content is :
> 
> #include "gdal.h"
> 
> CPLErr MyFunction(void **papoSources, int nSources, void *pData,
>                     int nXSize, int nYSize,
>                     GDALDataType eSrcType, GDALDataType eBufType,
>                     int nPixelSpace, int nLineSpace)
> {
>    /* implementation to write here */
> }
> 
> void GDALRegisterMe() /* this is the entry point. don't change this name */
> {
>     GDALAddDerivedBandPixelFunc("MyFunction", MyFunction);
> }
> 
> Compile it as a shared library, called gdal_XXXXXXXX.so (or .dll on
> windows), define GDAL_DRIVER_PATH to point to the directory of the shared
> library, et voilà ! The library will be loaded at runtime when the utilities 
> or the python bindings call the GDALRegisterAll() method and the pixel 
> function will be available to the VRT driver.

This is exactly the solution I'm currently using and I con confirm that
it works perfectly both on linux and windows.

I wrote a little plugin to register pixel functions attached to #3367
[1] (together with other more specific for my application domain) and
now both command line tools and python scripts can use pixel functions.

The only limitation is that there is no way, as far as I know, to write
a VRT file with a VRTDerivedRasterBand using the GDAL Python API.

While I can set the Band subClass at band creation time as follows:

ds.AddBand(gdal.GDT_Float32, ['subClass=VRTDerivedRasterBand'])

I was not able to find a way to set the PixelFunctionType and the
SourceTransferType parameters using the GDAL Python API.
As a workaround I write the VRT to disk and then I perform direct XML
manipulations via xml.etree (from the python standard lib).

Do I miss something?

It would be very nice to be able to set PixelFunctionType and
SourceTransferType asadditional creation options.


[1] http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/ticket/3367

Best regards

-- 
Antonio Valentino