Document Type
Article
Journal/Book Title/Conference
Computers & Geosciences
Volume
142
Publisher
Elsevier Ltd
Publication Date
5-29-2020
First Page
1
Last Page
32
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Abstract
We describe a data structure and associated algorithm called Fast Zonal Statistics (FZS) for the retrieval of the summary characteristics of an arbitrary polygon derived from a regular grid. The FZS algorithm can return numerical (e.g., mean, sum, and count) attributes for a polygonal object over a regular grid (e.g., raster data model). The computational complexity of the FZS algorithm is constant in relation to the length of the polygon perimeter. This contrasts with existing approaches which scale in relation to the polygon area, therefore we expect and measure geometric decreases in execution time using the proposed approach for simple polygon surfaces. We demonstrate applications of the algorithm and data structure on example datasets extracting the sum of impervious surface for watershed boundaries in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, a common use case.
Recommended Citation
Haag, S., Tarboton, D., Smith, M., & Shokoufandeh, A. 2020. Fast summarizing algorithm for polygonal statistics over a regular grid. Computers & Geosciences. Vol 142. 1-32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cageo.2020.104524