geo-rasterize: a pure-rust 2D rasterizer for geospatial applications

This crate is intended for folks who have some vector data (like a geo::Polygon) and a raster source (like a GeoTiff perhaps opened with GDAL) and who want to generate a boolean array representing which bits of raster are filled in by the polygon. There's also a Python wrapper available.

This implementation is based on GDAL's GDALRasterizeGeometries and allows you to rasterize any type supported by the geo-types package, including:

• Point
• Line
• LineString
• Polygon
• Rect and Triangle
• MultiPoint, MultiLineString, and MultiPolygon
• Geometry and GeometryCollection

Those shapes can have any coordintes with any numeric type as long as it can be converted into f64.

This crate matches GDAL's behavior when GDAL is supplied with the ALL_TOUCHED=TRUE option. So you can use it as a drop-in replacement for GDAL if you only need a GDAL-compatible rasterizer. Also, there's no support for GDAL's BURN_VALUE_FROM=Z. But otherwise, this code should produce identical results to GDAL's rasterizer -- the rasterization algorithm is a direct port. We use proptest to perform randomized differential comparisons with GDAL in order bolster confidence about our conformance.

Motivation: satellite imagery data analysis

Let's say you're interested in the free 10m resolution data from ESA's Sentinel-2 satellite mission. You might be especially interested in how farms change over time, and you've got a bunch of farms represented as polygons. You fetch some Sentinel-2 data from AWS. Since Sentinel-2 tiles are so large (over 110 million pixels!) and since they're stored as Cloud Optimized GeoTiffs, you convert your polygons into windows, and extract those windows from the image tiles; that way you only have to download the pixels that you care about.

But now you have a problem! Your polygons are not perfect rectangles axis-aligned to the Sentinel-2 tiling system. So while you have small field chips, you don't know which parts of those chips correspond to your polygons. Even worse, some of your polygons have holes (for example, to represent houses or ponds on the farms). That's where a [geo-rasterize] comes in! Using [geo-rasterize], you can convert your field polygons into a binary raster just like your Sentinel-2 field chips. And you can use those mask chips to select which pixels of the Sentinel-2 chips you care about. Filtering on the masks, you can now generate time series for imagery, secure in the knowledge that you're only examining pixels within your polygons!

Binary rasterization

Let's say you want to rasterize a polygon into a grid 4 pixels wide by 5 pixels high. To that, you simply construct a [BinaryRasterizer] using [BinaryBuilder], call rasterize with your polygon and call finish to get an Array2 of booleans.

# fn main() -> geo_rasterize::Result<()> {
use geo::polygon;
use ndarray::array;
use geo_rasterize::BinaryBuilder;

let poly = polygon![
    (x:4, y:2),
    (x:2, y:0),
    (x:0, y:2),
    (x:2, y:4),
    (x:4, y:2),
];

let mut r = BinaryBuilder::new().width(4).height(5).build()?;
r.rasterize(&poly)?;
let pixels = r.finish();

assert_eq!(
    pixels.mapv(|v| v as u8),
    array![
        [0, 1, 1, 0],
        [1, 1, 1, 1],
        [1, 1, 1, 1],
        [0, 1, 1, 1],
        [0, 0, 1, 0]
    ]
);
# Ok(()) }

...with multiple shapes

But what if you want to rasterize several geometries? That's easy enough!

# fn main() -> geo_rasterize::Result<()> {
use geo::{Geometry, Line, Point};
use ndarray::array;
use geo_rasterize::BinaryBuilder;

let shapes: Vec<Geometry<i32>> =
    vec![Point::new(3, 4).into(),
	     Line::new((0, 3), (3, 0)).into()];

let mut r = BinaryBuilder::new().width(4).height(5).build()?;
for shape in shapes {
    r.rasterize(&shape)?;
}

let pixels = r.finish();
assert_eq!(
    pixels.mapv(|v| v as u8),
    array![
        [0, 0, 1, 0],
        [0, 1, 1, 0],
        [1, 1, 0, 0],
        [1, 0, 0, 0],
        [0, 0, 0, 1]
    ]
);
# Ok(())}

Labeling (non-binary rasterization)

So far we've been generating binary arrays; what if you want to rasterize different shapes to the same integer array, storing a different value corresponding to each shape for each pixel? For that, we have [Rasterizer] which we construct using [LabelBuilder]. When you burn a shape with [Rasterizer] you provide not just the shape, but also a foreground label. But before you can burn anything, you have to specify a background label used to fill the empty raster array.

# use geo_rasterize::{Result, LabelBuilder, Rasterizer};
# fn main() -> Result<()> {
use geo::{Geometry, Line, Point};
use ndarray::array;

let point = Point::new(3, 4);
let line = Line::new((0, 3), (3, 0));

let mut rasterizer = LabelBuilder::background(0).width(4).height(5).build()?;
rasterizer.rasterize(&point, 3)?;
rasterizer.rasterize(&line, 7)?;

let pixels = rasterizer.finish();
assert_eq!(
    pixels.mapv(|v| v as u8),
    array![
        [0, 0, 7, 0],
        [0, 7, 7, 0],
        [7, 7, 0, 0],
        [7, 0, 0, 0],
        [0, 0, 0, 3]
    ]
);
# Ok(())}

Heatmaps

What happens if two shapes touch the same pixel? In the example above, the last shape written wins. But you can change that behavior by specifying a different value for [MergeAlgorithm] using LabelBuilder::algorithm. In fact, using MergeAlgorithm::Add, you can easily make a heat map showing the shape density where each pixel value tells you the number of shapes that landed on it!

# use geo_rasterize::{Result, LabelBuilder, Rasterizer, MergeAlgorithm};
# use geo::{Geometry, Line, Point};
# use ndarray::array;
# fn main() -> Result<()> {

let lines = vec![Line::new((0, 0), (5, 5)), Line::new((5, 0), (0, 5))];

let mut rasterizer = LabelBuilder::background(0)
    .width(5)
    .height(5)
    .algorithm(MergeAlgorithm::Add)
    .build()?;
for line in lines {
    rasterizer.rasterize(&line, 1)?;
}

let pixels = rasterizer.finish();
assert_eq!(
    pixels.mapv(|v| v as u8),
    array![
        [1, 0, 0, 0, 1],
        [0, 1, 0, 1, 1],
        [0, 0, 2, 1, 0],
        [0, 1, 1, 1, 0],
        [1, 1, 0, 0, 1]
    ]
);

# Ok(())}

Two lines cross at the center where you'll find 2. Note that [Rasterizer] is not limited to integers; any copyable type that can be added will do. [Rasterizer] offers similar functionality to rasterio's features.rasterize function.

Geographic transforms

All our examples so far have assumed that our shapes' coordinates are in the image space. In other words, we've assumed that the x coordinates will be in the range 0..width and the y coordinates will be in the range 0..height. Alas, that is often not the case!

For satellite imagery (or remote sensing imagery in general), images will almost always specify both a Coordinate Reference System (CRS) and an affine transformation in their metadata. See rasterio's Georeferencing for more details.

In order to work with most imagery, you have to convert your vector shapes from whatever their original CRS is (often EPSG:4326 for geographic longitude and latitude) into whatever CRS your data file specifies (often a UTM projection but there are so many choices). Then, you need to apply an affine transformation to convert from world coordinates to pixel coordinates. Since raster imagery usually specifies the inverse transformation matrix (i.e. a pix_to_geo transform), you'll first need to invert it to get a geo_to_pix transform before applying it to the coordinates. And now you've got pixel coordinates appropriate for your image data!

[BinaryRasterizer] and [Rasterizer] can ease this tedious process by taking care of the affine transformation. Make sure to pass a [Transform] object to [BinaryBuilder] or [LabelBuilder]. In either case, that transform is a geo_to_pix transform, which means you'll have to:

• extract the CRS from your image and convert your shapes into that CRS (probably using the proj crate and its integration with [geo types][geo],
• extract the pix_to_geo transform from your imagery metadata
• create a [Transform] instance from that data (GDAL represents these as a [f64; 6] array)
• call transform.inverse to get the corresponding geo_to_pix transform (since not all transforms are invertible, inverse gives you an Option)
• pass the resulting [Transform] to either [BinaryBuilder] or [LabelBuilder].

Performance

For polygons, our runtime is O(S * P * log(P)) where S is the number of scanlines (the polygon's vertical extent in pixels) and P is the number of coordinates in the polygon exterior and all its holes. Memory consumption is approximately P machine words. Because runtime depends so heavily on the number of coordinates, simplifying polygons before rasterization can speed up rasterization dramatically, especially in cases where polygons have very high resolution compared to the pixel size.

For other shapes, runtime is proportional to the number of pixels filled in.

Why not GDAL?

GDAL is the swiss army chainsaw of geospatial data processing. It handles vector data (by wrapping libgeos) and many data formats. The version that ships with Ubuntu 21.10 links to 115 shared libraries which includes support for handling PDF files, Excel spreadsheets, curl, Kerberos, ODBC, several XML libraries, a linear algebra solver, several cryptographic packages, and on and on and on. GDAL is a giant pile of C and C++ code slapped together in a fragile assembly. Building GDAL is a rather unpleasant since even a stripped down version depends on a bunch of other C and C++ packages. If you want to quickly build and deploy a static binary for AWS Lambda, rust makes that really easy, right up until you need GDAL. Then things get really really difficult.

Speaking of rust, I've been bitten multiple times in my career now with GDAL data race bugs that rust just forbids. I'm so tired.

Configuring GDAL is deeply unpleasant. Quick! Look at the GDAL configuration guide and tell me which of the 170ish configuration knobs I need to adjust to control GDAL's caching so that a lambda function that uses GDAL won't leak memory due to image caching? Ha! That's a trick question because you need multiple tunables to control the different caches. That's what you expect for a 23 year old 2.5 MLOC software library.

For a more pythonic perspective on the noGDAL movement, check out Kipling Crossing.

Alternative crates

• GDAL can rasterize but then you'll need to bring in GDAL which is difficult to deal with.
• raqote is a powerful 2D rasterizer intended for graphics.
• rasterize is another pure rust library, but less mature than raqote.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Have a look at the issues, and open a pull request if you'd like to add an algorithm or some functionality.

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.