[gdal-dev] gdal_polygonize.py TIF to JSON performance

[David Strip]

On 1/13/2015 2:37 AM, Graeme B. Bell wrote:
> Whenever you deal with national scale data for any country with coastline, you frequently end up with an absolutely gigantic and horrifically complex single polygon which depicts the coastline and all the rivers throughout the country as a single continuous edge. This mega-polygon, so often present and so often necessary, is very time-consuming for gdal_polygonise to produce and the result is very painful for every GIS geometry package to handle. 
>
> It would be great if the people behind gdal_polygonise could put some thought into this extremely common situation for anyone working with country or continent scale rasters to make sure that it is handled well. It has certainly affected us a great deal when working with data at up to 2m resolution for a country larger than the UK...

This second use case is a very bad mismatch to the design of the
polygonize algorithm, as you have discovered. If this is indeed a common
use case (I have no basis to judge one way or the other), a very
different algorithm would be far more appropriate.  In many respects,
the desired algorithm would also be easier to implement if the nature of
the data is basically binary - in the country/region/polygon, or out.
Matters get more complicated if we allow holes, disconnected regions, or
have multiple regions to identify (but a small number).

Perhaps one of the core project members could describe how to build a
case to support this need and submit an enhancement request.