[GRASS-dev] r.los scales badly

[Hamish]

Peter Hopfgartner  wrote:
> I've done some time measurements with r.los.
> 
> Basically I'm working on a DTM raster of Austria derived from SRTM data.
> 
> Thus, the region has a native res of 90m and has 2224 rows and 2228 columns.
> 
> If I'm doing a r.los after g.region -pa res=360 it takes 1.719 s to 
> complete the calculation (time taken through the time command). With 
> res=180, res=120, res=90 I get the following table:
> 
> res  t (s)
> ---   --------
> 360     1.72
> 180     17.96
> 120    123.68
>  90    688.37
> 
> It scales very badly. Is this expected? Are there better algorithms for 
> calculating LOS then that used in r.los?

Yes, it is expected that it scales very badly. Just recently a comment was
added  to the help page to that effect. To speed it up you can use a cover mask
(patt_map), or try r.cva (GRASS / GEM addons), which has more cover map options
(but is based on the same slow method).

I'd advise updating to GRASS 6.2.3rc or the latest 6.3 cvs to get new fixes for
r.los.


Paul found a faster method to use, see this post from Aug 2003 (RT bug 2061)
  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.grass.devel/1781

the link to the journal article is now dead, but Google Scholar found it:
  http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=14922941

'Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing' July 2003
'A Fast Algorithm for Approximate Viewshed Computation'
 by David Izraelevitz, USACE



Hamish



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