What is the center line of a complex polygon? (cont. again!)

I didn’t remember that I had 4 previous post on this topic, but I’ve gotten a little obsessed with this problem– how to (with relatively little computational cost) kind the centerline of complex polygons, so we can extract flow lines from streams, label long complex polygons, easily generate the centerline parcel boundary line for river bound parcels, etc..  FYI, here are my 4 previous posts … Continue reading What is the center line of a complex polygon? (cont. again!)

PostGIS Cartographic Effects– Cartoonify Nearly Coincident Lines

In my previous post, a long 24-hours ago, I proposed some automatic modification of line for cartographic reasons. I had some flaws in my code. The points were over-rotated by 45 degrees. Can you spot why? Tip: it’s a basic trigonometric mistake. Here’s the corrected code (though there may be a better way): An alternate approach is to only move those points that are too … Continue reading PostGIS Cartographic Effects– Cartoonify Nearly Coincident Lines

PostGIS Cartographic Effects– Cartoonify Nearly Coincident Lines

I’m still working on this query, but I thought I’d post what I’ve done so far. My intent is to produce scale-dependent exaggeration of the distances between quasi-parallel lines. The reason for this is so that lines such as street lines which are nearly coincident at a particular viewing scale can be spread from each other, much in the same way great cartography lies a … Continue reading PostGIS Cartographic Effects– Cartoonify Nearly Coincident Lines

GDAL Slopes– Local Hydrologic Slope vs. the Standard Approach

Open Source software is not, of course just about warm and fuzzies, great support, rapid development cycles, shared costs, etc., it’s also about getting your hands dirty with someone else’s code and implementing stuff more quickly and more intelligently because of it, and hopefully learning something in the process.  You don’t have to poke under the hood to drive the car, but sometimes it’s nice … Continue reading GDAL Slopes– Local Hydrologic Slope vs. the Standard Approach

Landscape Position: Conclusion? (part 2)

From earlier post: “I’ve managed to pilot most of a fast high resolution landscape position workflow with PovRay as my magic tool. The final steps I hope to pipe through PostGIS Raster. In the meantime a screenshot and description: blues are riparian, raw ocre, etc upland categories, grey is mostly flat lake plain and mid slopes, all derived from just a high res DEM input … Continue reading Landscape Position: Conclusion? (part 2)

gdal_calc.py– Raster Calculator using Numby Functions

gdal_calc is a python script that makes it easy to do band math and logical operations with gdal/numby. This ranges from basic arithemtic operations to logical functions. And while gdal_calc.py has been around since 2008, it is but is a recent and revelatory discovery for me. I had just today resigned myself to properly learning python so as to use the gdal bindings. But, my … Continue reading gdal_calc.py– Raster Calculator using Numby Functions

Landscape Position: Conclusion?

I’ve managed to pilot most of a fast high resolution landscape position workflow with PovRay as my magic tool. The final steps I hope to pipe through PostGIS Raster. In the meantime a screenshot and description: blues are riparian, raw ocre, etc upland categories, grey is mostly flat lake plain and mid slopes, all derived from just a high res DEM input (no hydro lines … Continue reading Landscape Position: Conclusion?

Postgis for breakfast: ST_Donut — Revision

A commenter on my last ST_Donut post pointed out that we were essentially using not one but two buffers and and ST_Intersection to test where a point lay.  Bad Spatial SQL. Very bad Spatial SQL. Actually, at Paul Ramsey’s PostGIS for Power Users presentation at FOSS4G this year, I think he mentioned not doing that very thing, and I chuckled to myself, “Well, even I … Continue reading Postgis for breakfast: ST_Donut — Revision

What is the center line of a complex polygon? (cont. 3)

Just a quick post on this one, this time. I haven’t implemented an approximation of Bálint Miklós‘ Scale Axis Transform in PostGIS yet, and I don’t think I’ll dare try in GeoTools for GeoServer just yet, but I thought I’d give a preview of the sensitivity of the medial axis calculations in “bumpy” streams with the following image: As you can see, the problem isn’t … Continue reading What is the center line of a complex polygon? (cont. 3)

What is the center line of a complex polygon? (cont. 2)

I glossed over the difficulties of finding the centerline of a complex polygon in the last couple of posts, and didn’t realize the disservice until we got to the nitty-gritty of finding the centerline of “bumpy” streams, for which our solution, which is arguably a discretized version of the traditional medial axis, is quite sensitive to noise and “bumpiness”. With a little more googling, my … Continue reading What is the center line of a complex polygon? (cont. 2)