Raster Data Model

Dr. Rohit Goyal

Reader, Civil Engineering
Malaviya National Institute of Technology
Jaipur
Topics Covered
 Different Data Formats
 Representation of Raster Data
 Layers
 Raster Coding
 Types of Raster Coding
 Resolution
 Image Depth
 Raster Data Model
 Advantages
 Disadvantages
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Data Formats
 Spatial Data in GIS has two primary data
formats
 Raster
 Vector
 Earliest GIS software were either Raster based
or Vector based, but now important GIS
software has capabilities in both formats.
 Both formats have their advantages and
disadvantages.
 Their exists many software for conversion
from Raster to Vector format. Conversion from
vector to Raster is easy and supported by most
software.
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Raster Data
 Raster data have become the primary source
of spatial data in geographic databases and
are used increasingly in a wide variety of GIS
applications
 Advances in computer technology have largely
eliminated the boundaries between Raster and
Vector data for GIS applications.
 An integrated raster and vector data working
environment provides many more
opportunities as you can combine the methods
suitable for both the formats in your analysis.

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Representation of Raster Data
 Study area is divided into regular cells of
specific dimensions and the measurement or
attribute of each cell is represented by a digital
code.
 Locations of raster cells are not explicitly recorded
but are inferred from their positions in the image.
 If the placement of image (locations of one of
it’s corner, usually top-left or bottom-left,
scale factor and direction of placement) is
know then location of any cell can be
determined.
 In computer raster data can be easily represented by
a matrix (2D array), where each cell is indexed by it’s
row and column numbers.
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Representation of Raster Data
 Raster data represents
 Points by single cells
 Line by sequence of neighboring cells
 Polygons by collections of contiguous cells.
 Each cell in the grid carry a value as either a
integer or floating point number.
 Integers are used to typically define a category
such as 1 for water, 2 for forest
 Floating point numbers typically represents
continuous data such as temperature, average
annual precipitation, elevation etc.

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Organization of Raster Data
 Raster data are usually organized into layers, which are
also known as bands, themes or overlays.
 Each layer depict a specific characteristic such as
topography, soil type, drainage, vegetation cover, land
use etc.
 Though raster data model is better suited for continuous
phenomena, we can use raster data model to represent
discreet features as well.
 However is a lake on raster map consists of many cells
in raster model, than though seeing the raster layer we
may immediately recognize the lake, but database does
not recognize or identify the lake as a single entity.
 You can typically store an integral value, say 72, in all the
cells occupying lake to recognize these cells separately
from other entities

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Raster Coding
 There are many ways of raster coding
 Presence/Absence
• We can use numbers to indicate
presence/absence of specific entities. Most often
0 is used to indicate absence.
 Cell Centre
• Whatever feature is present at the centre point of
each cell may be recorded in the cell. Many
disadvantages of this approach because points
may not lie in the centre of the cell.

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Raster Coding...
 Dominant Area
 For coding polygons, we may find that cell contains
more than one type of feature, then we can classify
the cell based on the feature occupying maximum
space.
 Each pixel or cell is assumed to have only one value.
 Percentage Coverage
 For each type of feature, we record the percentage it
occupies in any cell.
 The NARIS system developed a the University of
Illinois in the 1970s allowed each pixel to have any
number of values and associated percentages
 Example: 30% a, 30% b, 40% c

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 Presence/Absence

Line Features
Point Features

Polygon Features
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Cell Centre

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Dominant Area

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Percentage Area

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Resolution
 The linear dimension of the cells, expressed in
terms of actual ground distance in meters or
Kms, is known as spatial resolution.
 The cell size (or number of rows and columns
in given area) determines the resolution of the
raster data model.
 A large cell cannot represent the precise
location of spatial features thus increasing the
chance of having mixed features in a cell.
 Small cell size increases the data volume and
the data processing time.

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 Resolution

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Image Depth
 Amount of computer memory, in term of
bits, used to store the value in the cell is
called image depth.
 1 bit image recording absence/presence of a
feature use least memory. Known as black
and white drawing.
 8 bit gray scale image usually stores value
from 0-255 in each cell, indicating gray
levels. Known as gray scale map or black
and white photograph.
• Such images can be displayed in color by cross
referencing cell values to a color look-up table
(LUT). Known as pseudo-color image.

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24 bit images
 In color scanning each cell contains a value
between 0 to 255 for each of the red, green
and blue primary colors.
 These values combine together to form over 16
million colors.
 Such Images are known as 24 bit true color
images.
 In some image processing software we can
further add a intensity layer to generate a 32
bit color image.
 This way we can combine 4 different layers to form
our composite image.

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Advantages of Raster Data Model
 Ability to represent different types of
continuous surfaces.
 Topography, landuse/landcover, air quality, ground
water pollution level etc. can be stored at raster
layers. This allows us to develop simple modeling
software which can combine these layers to generate
new layers.
 Fast computer processing.
 Since all languages support 2D arrays so it is
conceptually simpler to work with raster data.
Further working on 2 or more raster layers is like
performing operations on matrices, which is well
developed and optimized science.

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Advantages…
 Fast display of surface data
 Since display is organized in similar manner (three
guns working at pixel level), so it is faster to perform
graphical operations of raster images.
 Many GUI such as Windows GUI, X-Windows etc.
allow efficient operations on raster data such as
scaling, zoom, pan etc.
 Ability to handle very large databases
 Large raster data sets can be handled effectively
using two techniques.
• Tiling: Dividing larger grid cells into smaller blocks
• Compression: reduces storage requirement to a
fraction. With ECW compression 1 GB image could be
reduced to 100 MB only.

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Advantages…
 Applications that are difficult using vector data
 Many spatial and modeling applications work only on
data in raster format.
 For example, hydrologic modeling requiring
simulation of flow of water across terrain, which is
easily achieved with elevation raster model.
 Similarly tracking movement of pollutants is best
carried out with raster data because you need to
simultaneously tackle location as well as
concentration.
 Simultaneous manipulation of location (easily
tracked by choosing appropriate cell) and attribute’s
level (easily tracked as value stored in that cell) is
special ability of Raster data model.
 Remote Sensing Data (Major source) is based
on raster data model.
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Disadvantages
 Disadvantages of Raster model are
 Not suitable for applications that rely on individual
spatial features represented by points, lines and
polygons. For example network applications.
 Precise locations may not be recorded as in case of
vector data.
 Features are usually generalized and do not appear
as cartographically pleasing as vector data.
 Resolution of data determines applicability of raster
data. Increasing resolution increases volume of data
and reduces processing speed.
 Beyond certain zoom factor, raster data gives
disjointed appearance.
 Reprojection to different map projection is difficult.

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