Unit 13 - PyGRASS Raster Access

PyGRASS allows directly accessing native GRASS raster and vector maps in the sense of Python objects. This unit shows how to deal with GRASS raster data by PyGRASS API, see Unit 14 - PyGRASS Vector Access for vector data.

Raster data

Raster map can be treated by RasterRow for reading raster data row by row. There is also RasterSegment which allows reading data by user-defined segments (tiles).

from grass.pygrass.raster import RasterRow

Raster map is open by open() method. Basic information like number of columns and rows, min and max values, range printed.

ndvi.open()
print(ndvi.info.cols, ndvi.info.rows)
min, max = ndvi.info.range
print(min, max)
print(max - min)

Fig. 84 Running PyGRASS code from Python tab of Layer Manager.

Don’t forget to close the raster map at the end.

ndvi.close()

Raster statistics example

A simple PyGRASS script for computing basic univariate raster statistics below.

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import numpy

from grass.pygrass.raster import RasterRow

ndvi = RasterRow('ndvi')
ndvi.open()

min = max = None
count = ncount = 0
for row in ndvi:
    for value in row:
        if numpy.isnan(value):
            ncount += 1
        else:
            if min is None:
                min = max = value
            else:
                if min > value:
                    min = value
                elif max < value:
                    max = value
        count += 1

ndvi.close()

print ("min={0:.6f} max={1:.6f} count={2} (no-data: {3})".format(
    min, max, count, ncount)
)

Sample script to download: ndvi-pygrass-univar.py

Tip

Compare computation speed of your simple script with C-based r.univar module.

Fig. 85 PyGRASS script and r.univar comparision.

Writing raster data

PyGRASS allows also writing raster data. In the example below a NDVI map will be computed from Sentinel-2 red and near-infrated channels.

import numpy

from grass.pygrass.raster import RasterRow

b04 = RasterRow('L2A_T32UPB_20170706T102021_B04_10m')
b04.open()
b08 = RasterRow('L2A_T32UPB_20170706T102021_B08_10m')
b08.open()
ndvi = RasterRow('ndvi_pyrass')
ndvi.open('w', mtype='FCELL', overwrite=True)

for i in range(len(b04)):
    row_b04 = b04[i]
    row_b08 = b08[i]
    rowb04 = row_b04.astype(numpy.float32)
    rowb08 = row_b08.astype(numpy.float32)
    row_new = (rowb08 - rowb04) / (rowb08 + rowb04)
    ndvi.put_row(row_new)
    
ndvi.close() 
b04.close()
b08.close()

Sample script to download: ndvi-pygrass.py

Tip

To create a raster map from scratch the number of rows and columns must be defined. Raster row is represented by Buffer object in PyGRASS.

import numpy

from grass.pygrass.raster import RasterRow

newscratch = RasterRow('newscratch')
newscratch.open('w', overwrite=True)

# get computational region info
from grass.pygrass.gis.region import Region
reg = Region()

# import buffer and create empty row
from grass.pygrass.raster.buffer import Buffer
newrow = Buffer((reg.cols,), mtype='CELL')

# we create a raster to fill all the GRASS GIS region
for r in range(reg.rows):
    newrow[:] = numpy.random.random_integers(0, 1000, size=newrow.size)
    newscratch.put_row(newrow)
          
newscratch.close()

Sample script to download: pygrass-write-raster.py

Fig. 86 Example of created raster map.