[gdal-dev] Status and future of the GDAL GNM and image correlator

[Alexander Bruy]

Hi all,

More than ten years ago, two features were added to GDAL during GSoC
projects: the raster correlator [0] and support for the Geographic
Network Model (GNM) [1]. Both features seem to have remained
limited/experimental, with almost no activity except for code
formatting and compilation fixes. As far as I know, they also are
rarely included in default builds by major distributions/packages, and
the correlator API is not exposed via SWIG.

I wonder what is the status and future of this code? Are there any
plans to improve and expose it, or is the project leaning toward
deprecation and removal to reduce maintenance overhead?

In the past I developed an experimental QGIS plugin that uses GDAL GNM
via Python bindings and considered exposing the correlator as well. I
would love to hear your thoughts on the future of these two features
before investing further into plugins, and potentially to the GDAL.

Thanks,
Alex

[0] https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/master/alg/gdalmatching.cpp
[1] https://gdal.org/en/stable/user/gnm_data_model.html