[GRASS-dev] r.neighbors modification

[Glynn Clements]

Hamish wrote:

> > > > r.mfilter ?
> > > 
> > > that looks good, but as far as I understood it, it is not possible
> > > to conduct statistics on this filter (beside divisor), is it?
> > 
> > I don't think that you can compute anything except for sum and mean
> > using r.mfilter.

By "anything", I mean that these are the only "standard" aggregates
(those offered by r.neighbors) which can be computed.

> is this an inherent limitation of the method, or has it just not been
> coded yet?

The former. The result is just a weighted sum of the cells in the
window, so you are limited to linear functions.

An all-ones matrix with a divisor of one gives the sum, while an
all-ones matrix with a divisor equal to the number of ones gives the
mean.

All of the other standard aggregates have some kind of non-linearity.

Variance and standard deviation can be implemented using two passes of
each of r.mfilter and r.mapcalc, e.g.:

	r.mfilter input=foo output=foo.sum filter=sum.txt
	r.mapcalc "foo.sq = foo^2"
	r.mfilter input=foo.sq output=foo.sumsq filter=sum.txt
	r.mapcalc "foo.var = (foo.sumsq - foo.sum^2/$N)/$N ; foo.sdev = sqrt(foo.var)"

> it would be nice to have a powerful r.mfilter (not as grand as
> r.mapcalc, but more customizable than just sum+mean.

There isn't really any "obvious" intermediate level between the linear
filters which are already available in r.mfilter and the arbitrary
expressions offered by r.mapcalc.

E.g. I can't think of any enhancement which would allow you to
implement median/minimum/maximum filters.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>