Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python - Third Edition

By : Joel Lawhead
Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python - Third Edition

By: Joel Lawhead

Overview of this book

Geospatial analysis is used in almost every domain you can think of, including defense, farming, and even medicine. With this systematic guide, you'll get started with geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing analysis using the latest features in Python. This book will take you through GIS techniques, geodatabases, geospatial raster data, and much more using the latest built-in tools and libraries in Python 3.7. You'll learn everything you need to know about using software packages or APIs and generic algorithms that can be used for different situations. Furthermore, you'll learn how to apply simple Python GIS geospatial processes to a variety of problems, and work with remote sensing data. By the end of the book, you'll be able to build a generic corporate system, which can be implemented in any organization to manage customer support requests and field support personnel.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: The History and the Present of the Industry
5
Section 2: Geospatial Analysis Concepts
10
Section 3: Practical Geospatial Processing Techniques

GDAL

GDAL is the dominant geospatial library for raster data. Its raster capability is so significant that it is a part of virtually every geospatial toolkit in any language, and Python is no exception to this. To see the basics of how GDAL works in Python, download the following sample raster satellite image as a ZIP file and unzip it: https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/SatImage.zip. Let's open this image and see how many bands it has and how many pixels are present along each axis:

>>> from osgeo import gdal
>>> raster = gdal.Open("SatImage.tif")
>>> raster.RasterCount
3
>>> raster.RasterXSize
2592
>>> raster.RasterYSize
2693

By viewing it in OpenEV, we can see that the following image has three bands, 2,592 columns of pixels, and 2,693 rows of pixels:

GDAL is an extremely fast geospatial raster reader and...