Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python

By : Joel Lawhead
Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python

By: Joel Lawhead

Overview of this book

Geospatial Analysis is used in almost every field you can think of from medicine, to defense, to farming. This book will guide you gently into this exciting and complex field. It walks you through the building blocks of geospatial analysis and how to apply them to influence decision making using the latest Python software. Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python, 2nd Edition uses the expressive and powerful Python 3 programming language to guide you through geographic information systems, remote sensing, topography, and more, while providing a framework for you to approach geospatial analysis effectively, but on your own terms. We start by giving you a little background on the field, and a survey of the techniques and technology used. We then split the field into its component specialty areas: GIS, remote sensing, elevation data, advanced modeling, and real-time data. This book will teach you everything you need to know about, Geospatial Analysis from using a particular software package or API to using generic algorithms that can be applied. This book focuses on pure Python whenever possible to minimize compiling platform-dependent binaries, so that you don’t become bogged down in just getting ready to do analysis. This book will round out your technical library through handy recipes that will give you a good understanding of a field that supplements many a modern day human endeavors.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Overviews


Overview data is most commonly found in raster formats. Overviews are resampled, lower resolution versions of raster datasets that provide thumbnail views or simply faster loading image views at different map scales. They are also known as pyramids and the process of creating them is known as pyramiding an image. These overviews are usually preprocessed and stored with the full resolution data either embedded with the file or in a separate file. The compromise of this convenience is that the additional images add to the overall file size of the dataset; however, they speed up image viewers. Vector data also has a concept of overviews, usually to give a dataset geographic context in an overview map. However, because vector data is scalable, reduced size overviews are usually created on the fly by software using a generalization operation as mentioned in Chapter 1, Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python.

Occasionally, vector data is rasterized by converting it into a thumbnail image...