floating point grass rasters and mapserver - a resume

Jachym Cepicky jachym.cepicky at CENTRUM.CZ
Sun Oct 16 03:43:44 PDT 2005


very well!

I did it by hand till now (well I do not have so many raster in GRASS
and ... how often do one need to change the color table?)

could you post this script on GRASS-Addons site?
(http://grass.gdf-hannover.de/twiki/bin/view/GRASS/GrassAddOns)

Jáchym

On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 12:35:14PM +0200, Andrea Antonello wrote:
> Some time ago I was dealing with mapserver getting maps from a GRASS location. 
> The maps are all floating point maps and as you (whoever interested) probably 
> followed in a few mails, the result of most of my maps simply resulted in a 
> single color layer (in my case it was yellow).
> Frank Warmerdam helped me to solve what was solvable and workaround what was 
> "workaroundable".
> The following is an extract and resume of the mails exchange.
> Any reply and correction is appreciated.
> 
> Alright, the problem was not only one, but a bunch concurring:
> 1) GRASS novalues are not supported and give problems
> 
> Running gdalinfo -mm on the map, we find that part of the problem is that 
> nodata values are being treated as "nan" (not a number).  GDAL and mapserver 
> do not know how to excluse "nan" nodata values from the min/max calculation 
> so the autoscaling gets all screwed up.
> 
> Here we can see it in the gdalinfo output:
> <SNIPPET>
> Band 1 Block=385x1 Type=Float64, ColorInterp=Palette
>   Min=0.000 Max=229172.410   Computed Min/Max=nan,nan
>   NoData Value=nan
> <SNIPPET>
> 
> Therefore the min and max have to ge defined and supplied to the map file with 
> the following:
> PROCESSING SCALE=min max
> 
> 2) There is a problem with the creation of color ramps in the case of a big 
> number of not homogeneous distributed values:
> 
> <SNIPPET>
>   Color Table (RGB with 100001 entries)
>     0: 0,0,0,0
>     1: 255,255,0,255
>     2: 255,255,0,255
>     3: 255,255,0,255
>     ...
> <SNIPPET>
> 
> This is why I had a yellow map.  The first 256 values of the color table were 
> used by MapServer for the after-scaling values.  Effectively the first 256 
> entries of the color table are all shades of yellow.
> 
> 3) MapServer does not support the GRASS color rules metadata
> 
> <SNIPPET>
> Metadata:
>   COLOR_TABLE_RULES_COUNT=5
>   COLOR_TABLE_RULE_RGB_0=1.000000e+00 4.583448e+04 255 255 0 0 255 0
>   COLOR_TABLE_RULE_RGB_1=4.583448e+04 9.166896e+04 0 255 0 0 255 255
>   COLOR_TABLE_RULE_RGB_2=9.166896e+04 1.375034e+05 0 255 255 0 0 255
>   COLOR_TABLE_RULE_RGB_3=1.375034e+05 1.833379e+05 0 0 255 255 0 255
>   COLOR_TABLE_RULE_RGB_4=1.833379e+05 2.291724e+05 255 0 255 255 0 0
> <SNIPPET/>
> 
> The metadata contains the coloring rules that should be applied. However, 
> mapserver does not currently know how to use this sort of color rule 
> metadata. For now the only solution is to recreate classes that are value 
> similar. One problem though is that MapServer classes don't allow applying a 
> range of color to a range of values like GRASS (or QGIS).  Applying own 
> CLASSes in the LAYER makes mapserver ignore the color table.
> 
> The CLASSes option has two main drawbacks:
> 
> a) The CLASS does not allow color ranges. There is no big solution (only 
> workarounds), if not to wait on the new range based class coloring that Bill 
> Binko has been working on. An implementation of that is available in 4.6.x 
> but it is under revision.
> 
> b) If we decide to create a set of CLASS rules to get the map drawn "as if" it 
> was interpolated, you will need to create a lot of rules, which gives big big 
> performance problems in drawing the map. This can however be solved with a 
> PROCESSING command. Here the explanation:
> The problem is that the class lookup is done once for each "bucket" in the 
> lookup table and that by default there are 65536 buckets. It helps a lot to 
> add the following line in the LAYER definition:
> 
>   PROCESSING "SCALE_BUCKETS=200"
> 
> This basically alters the resolution of the lookup table but substantially 
> accelerates things.
> 
> 
> 
> After some testing on what would be the best to do for now, I'm now letting 
> the following bash script snippet for automated creation of the raster part 
> mapfile. It contains the solutions and workarounds reported in this document:
> 
>     # the path to the grass cellheader file
>     absolutepath=$mapsetpath/cellhd/$i
> 
>     echo "LAYER" > rastertmpfile
>     echo "  NAME $i" >> rastertmpfile
>     echo "  TYPE RASTER" >> rastertmpfile
>     echo "  STATUS ON" >> rastertmpfile
>     echo "  DATA \"$absolutepath\"" >> rastertmpfile
> 
>     # extract the min and max
>     minmax=`gdalinfo -mm $absolutepath | grep Min | awk -F "=" '{print $2, 
> $3}' | awk '{print $1, $3}'`
>     # extract the gdal computed min and max
>     gdalrange=`gdalinfo -mm $absolutepath | grep "Computed Min" |awk -F 
> "Computed Min/Max=" '{print $2}' | awk -F "," '{print $1}'`
> 
> 
>     # if gdal has problems with colortables and novalues, it is not able to 
> compute the range,
>     # therefore we have to supply it and create a set of ad hoc colorrules
>     if [ "$gdalrange" == "nan" ]
>     then    
>         # minmax has the format "123 234", so just extract them
>         min=`echo $minmax | awk '{print $1}' | awk -F "." '{print $1}'`
>         max=`echo $minmax | awk '{print $2}' | awk -F "." '{print $1}'`
> 
>         # define a default colortable, rainbow of grass, but with "bin + 1" 
> number of rules,
>         # to get more colors and give the sensation to be interpolated
>         bins=19
>         delta=$((($max-$min)/$bins))
>         
>         if [ $delta -ne 0 ]
>         then
>             colors[1]="255 255 0"
>             
>             colors[2]="195 255 0"
>             colors[3]="130 255 0"
>             colors[4]="65  255 0"
>             
>             colors[5]="0   255 0"
>             
>             colors[6]="0   255 65"
>             colors[7]="0   255 130"
>             colors[8]="0   255 195"
>             
>             colors[9]="0   255 255"
>             
>             colors[10]="0   195 255"
>             colors[11]="0   130 255"
>             colors[12]="0   65  255"
>             
>             colors[13]="0   0   255"
>             
>             colors[14]="65  0   255"
>             colors[15]="130 0   255"
>             colors[16]="195 0   255"
> 
>             colors[17]="255 0   255"
>             colors[18]="255 0   195"
>             colors[19]="255 0   130"
>             colors[20]="255 0   65"
> 
> 
>             # add the processing commands
>             echo "  PROCESSING \"SCALE=$min $max\"" >> rastertmpfile
>             echo "  PROCESSING \"SCALE_BUCKETS=100\"" >> rastertmpfile
> 
> 
>             # create the CLASSes, labeling them with the pixel value
>             first=$min
>             second=$(($min+$delta))
>             for j in `seq 1 $bins`
>             do    
>                 echo "  CLASS " >> rastertmpfile
>                 echo "      NAME \"$first\"" >> rastertmpfile
>                 echo "      EXPRESSION ([pixel] >= $first and[pixel] < 
> $second)" >> rastertmpfile
>                 echo "      COLOR ${colors[$j]}" >> rastertmpfile
>                 echo "  END" >> rastertmpfile
>                 first=$(($first+$delta))
>                 second=$(($second+$delta))
>             done   
>             
>             # add a last CLASSes, due to bash maths limitations
>             echo "  CLASS " >> rastertmpfile
>             echo "      NAME \"$max\"" >> rastertmpfile
>             echo "      EXPRESSION ([pixel] >= $first and[pixel] < $max)" >> 
> rastertmpfile
>             echo "      COLOR ${colors[20]}" >> rastertmpfile
>             echo "  END" >> rastertmpfile
>         fi
>     fi    
> 
> 
> 
> Hope this helps someone, the script is not very stylistic, but at least it 
> does the job for me. :)
> 
> Ciao,
> Andrea
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> ____________________________________________________________________________
> HydroloGIS - Environmental Open Source Solutions
> www.hydrologis.com
> 
> Andrea Antonello
> Environmental Engineer
> mobile:  +393288497722
> 
> "Let it be as much a great honour to take as to give learning,
> if you want to be called wise."
> Skuggsja' - The King's mirror - 1240 Reykjavik
> ____________________________________________________________________________

-- 
Jachym Cepicky
e-mail: jachym.cepicky at centrum.cz
URL: http://les-ejk.cz
GPG: http://les-ejk.cz/gnupg_public_key/
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