Raster Processor
Developed by Roberts Geospatial Engineering.
Introduction
Raster Processor (ERP.exe) is an application for 64-bit Windows. It is developed in C++ using MFC and was built using Visual Studio 2019 version 16.9.0. It was developed by Roberts Geospatial Engineering (RGE) in February 2021 for the exclusive use of the client.
RGE do not provide an installation for ERP. To install ERP, create a directory and copy the supplied files into that directory. Create a shortcut to the file “ERP.exe”.
ERP depends upon the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio (x64). This can be installed from –
Main Dialog
ERP provides a framework in which a user can select a processing operation to perform, set the properties for that processing operation, and then execute the operation. Whilst the operation is running the user can view a log of messages generated by the operation and monitor the progress of the operation. At any time, the operation can be paused or cancelled. The application has been delivered with a single operation, but additional operations can be added by RGE in the future if desired.
On the main dialog, select the processing operation you wish to execute from the drop-list of operations, and then hit the “Properties” button to open the properties dialog for that operation. Once the properties have been set, hit the “Commence” button to begin processing.
The dialog changes configuration to show a message list and progress bar. As the operation proceeds the progress will be reported and you may see messages displayed in the list.
You can show or hide the message list as well as filter it to display all messages or only warnings or errors. In some cases, an operation will display a warning or error, but the operation will be able to continue. In other scenarios, the operation may ask the user to confirm that the operation should continue. At this time, the user can elect to cancel the operation. An error may also result in the immediate termination of the operation. How the interface responds in the event of a warning or error is decided by the operation developer.
When an operation is running, hit the “Pause” button to pause processing. You can then hit the “Resume” button to restart processing where you left off. To cancel an operation, hit the “Stop” button. Once the operation has been canceled or completed, you can hit the “Return” button to return to the main dialog or the “Close” button to close the application.
The progress bar shows the progress of the operation as it is running. Sometimes, you may see the progress bar go backward. This occurs because the system cannot predict, in advance, all the processing tasks and sub-tasks that it has to perform. When unexpected work is encountered, the system will re-evaluate how much of the operation it has completed, and it may get revised backward. If you see this occur, do not be concerned.
Group MRR to VM Conversion Operation (MTV)
This operation is designed to process a selected group of MRR format rasters that have been generated by Infovista Planet. The operation performs the following functions –
Finalises all the input rasters
This may involve computing the overview pyramid for the raster and computing the base level statistics for each raster. A control has now been added to enable or disable the computation of the overview pyramid. The overview pyramid is stored in a .pprc file. The operation can complete successfully without generating this cache.
Validates the input rasters
The operation makes sure that the cell size of all the rasters is the same, and that those cells all align. The minimum bounding box of the union of all the rasters is computed.
Converts the input rasters
Each input MRR format raster is converted to a Vertical Mapper format. This may be in either a GRD format (for continuous fields) or GRC (for classified fields). The geometry of all the output rasters will be identical – they will share the same origin, cell size and extent. To be compatible with client in-house software, rasters output in GRD format will use 16-bit integers for data storage and GRC format rasters will use 8-bit data storage.
In the properties dialog, hit the “Folder” button to select the folder which contains the MRR format input rasters. All files in the selected folder with an MRR extension will be selected for processing. Alternatively, hit the “Files” button to select one or more MRR files. Once a selection has been made, the files that have been selected for processing are shown in the list.
By default, the output rasters will be written into a folder called “Converted” which is sub-ordinate to the folder containing the input rasters. This output folder will be created when you execute the operation. Alternatively, after you have selected the input rasters, you can hit the output “Folder” button to manually change or create the output folder. The output files will have the same name as the input files, but with either a GRD or GRC extension. You can also add a suffix to the output filenames to further differentiate them from the input files. The default suffix is “_converted”.
The operation will compute statistics for each MRR if the MRR does not already have base level statistics stored internally. This will be written into a .ghx file next to the MRR. If the “Generate overviews…” check box is selected, then the operation will also generate an overview cache if the MRR does not already have this stored internally. This will be written into a .pprc file next to the MRR.
The operation will ensure that all the output rasters have the same geometry, which is a requirement of the client in-house processing software. For some background information on raster size and geometry, see this article – Raster Size Concepts Explained – How big is my raster? – Roberts Geospatial. The operation will report the output geometry in the message list as shown below.
Update – Version 1.0.02, 2 July 2021
The Vertical Mapper raster format stores decimal numbers as scaled integers. To convert the decimal to integer, it applies a simple translation and scaling and rounds off the result to an integer. You can now control this transformation and set the scaling factor manually via the property pages. The translation value is set by the system to the smallest integer value less than the minimum value in the band.