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

Extracting features from images


The ability to classify an image leads us to another remote sensing capability. Now that you've worked with shapefiles over the last few chapters, have you ever wondered where they come from? Vector GIS data such as shapefiles are typically extracted from remotely-sensed images like the examples that we've seen so far. Extraction normally involves an analyst clicking around each object in an image and drawing the feature to save it as data. It is also possible with good remotely-sensed data and proper preprocessing to automatically extract features from an image.

For this example, we'll take a subset of our Landsat 8 thermal image to isolate a group of barrier islands, as shown in the following screenshot:

You can download this image here:

http://git.io/vqarj

Our goal with this example is to automatically extract the three islands in the image as a shapefile. Before we can do this, we need to mask out any data that we aren't interested in. For example, the water...