[gdal-dev] gdal_clip

[Zachary L. Stauber]

Dear developers,
      I would like to contribute some code to the project.  I have a 
utility I call gdal_clip I wrote wrote in C++, which I used to compile 
against the FWTools gdal .lib file and later Mr. Szekeres .lib files, 
which will "clip" an image.  It uses an input image and an input polygon 
shapefile, and where the polygons in the shapefile overlap the image, it 
will fill them in with a chosen color (defaults to black).  It will NOT 
resize the output image in any way.
      This was useful for me to black out, or white out areas of tiles 
in orthophoto projects that were outside the project boundary (outside 
of control network and therefore of low accuracy).  I am out of the 
photogrammetry business, but I have photogrammetry colleagues who wish 
for me to recompile this every time there is a new set of builds on 
gisinternals.com/sdk, so it may be useful to build it into GDAL's code.
      It is pretty optimized, not doing a pixel-in-polygon check for 
EVERY pixel, but breaking the image into tiles and then breaking those 
tiles into quarters only if they intersect the polygons, and so forth 
down to individual pixels.  It works correctly with doughnut polygons 
and rotated images.  I probably need to pretty up the code in some way 
friendly to Doxygen, but otherwise it is ready to go.
      In the future I'd like to generalize the code to deal with 
polygons from any vector data source that OGR reads, and optionally 
resize an image to cut it down if large parts are clipped.  It would 
also be nice to make it smart enough to reproject the input polygons to 
the image's coordinate reference system if they are not the same.  I 
also think right now it only reads in and outputs TIFF images.  But 
again, I think it is useful right now.  Please let me know if you all 
think this would be useful or would like the code to see.
      It is all MIT license right now, but could be changed to GDAL's 
standard license if necessary.

      -Zack Stauber
       Albuquerque, New Mexico
       United States