{"id":121601,"date":"2008-04-10T18:50:24","date_gmt":"2008-04-10T18:50:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.esri.com\/arcgis-blog\/products\/product\/uncategorized\/getting-better-vectors-from-your-rasters-with-arcscan\/"},"modified":"2008-04-10T18:50:24","modified_gmt":"2008-04-10T18:50:24","slug":"getting-better-vectors-from-your-rasters-with-arcscan","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/arcgis-blog\/products\/product\/mapping\/getting-better-vectors-from-your-rasters-with-arcscan","title":{"rendered":"Getting better vectors from your rasters with ArcScan"},"author":4331,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_searchwp_excluded":""},"categories":[22941],"tags":[23011,29051],"industry":[],"product":[],"class_list":["post-121601","blog","type-blog","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mapping","tag-raster","tag-vector"],"acf":{"short_description":"By Aileen Buckley, Mapping Center Lead\n\n\n\nI've often had the situation where I wanted to use a raster data source as a single-color map b...","flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"

By Aileen Buckley, Mapping Center Lead<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Getting<\/p>\n

I’ve often had the situation where I wanted to use a raster data source as a single-color map background layer, but the cell size or other data processing output resulted in a ‘blocky’ or ‘pixelated’ appearance to the data at the map scale I need. A simple raster-to-vector data conversion served only to recreate the boxes or ‘saw-tooth’ or ‘stair-step’ lines from the original raster. The ArcScan extension<\/a> has tools that reduce or remove this problem, and create an output vector data layer with smooth polygon boundaries or more naturally sinuous lines.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Below (figure 1) is a USGS DRG mosaic of the Crater Lake National Park area in Oregon. The original data came to me as a large MrSID file which contained data from at least a dozen original DRGs (an excerpt from the Park HQ area is shown at left). I was able to locate most of the vector data for topographic features, roads, hydrology, etc. from National Park Service and USGS websites.<\/p>\n

\"Getting<\/p>\n

A challenge was finding vegetation or ground cover information I could use for the green “forested” shade on the map, but eventually I found vegetation surface cover data from the National Park Service – Pacific Northwest Region Database (http:\/\/nrdata.nps.gov\/crla\/crladata<\/a>) stored as an ArcInfo raster in export format as “clnp_species.e00”. A few data processing steps ensued, and I reclassified the data to create a new output raster with just two values: ‘covered’ and ‘uncovered’. The result for the area of interest is shown below; the screen shot was captured displayed at 1:24,000 scale with my ArcMap application window at full size (i.e. I’m not zoomed in excessively):<\/p>\n

\"Getting<\/p>\n

Compare this to the map excerpt at the top of this article – the jagged appearance of the 25 meter cell size is too obvious at the scale I want to use.<\/p>\n

What I wanted to do was keep the general depiction of ground cover, but avoid the rough appearance of this data, so I turned to the ArcScan extension Vectorization Settings to convert the vegetation species raster into a polygon feature class with smooth boundaries. To do this yourself, follow these basic steps:<\/p>\n

1) Create new, empty polygon and line feature classes<\/a> to hold the output geometry, and add them to your map.<\/p>\n

2) Add the ArcScan toolbar<\/a> and start an edit session. The first setting I changed for this was in the Vectorization Options dialog, where I changed the Vectorization Method from Centerline to Outline.<\/p>\n

3) Next, open the Vectorization Settings<\/a>. Obviously you’ll need to experiment with these settings to suit your
\nown data and mapping purposes, but I offer what I used as a place for you to start. Shown below are the default Vectorization Settings (the units of measure are pixels):<\/p>\n

\"Getting<\/p>\n

The setting with the most effect was Hole Size, I experimented with Gap Closure Tolerance, but this setting didn’t have much effect on the output of this data. The small squares shown in the original raster above are 25-meters, and therefore were translated into small, round polygons on output. These couldn’t be removed by either of these settings, as these one-cell features were neither ‘gap’ nor ‘hole’. So the main issue I was able to control was the number of small, cell-sized holes which remained in the main ‘covered’ areas. A Hole Size setting of 3 proved satisfactory.<\/p>\n

One handy feature in the Vectorization Settings drop-down is the ability to toggle on\/off ‘Show Preview’ so that you can see what your changes look like prior to committing them to a new feature class.<\/p>\n

5) Generate new features.<\/p>\n

\"Getting<\/p>\n

6) Admire your work.<\/p>\n

Shown below are the results of my raster-to-vector conversion, which when added to my map ended up looking close to the original DRG (figure ).<\/p>\n

\"Getting<\/p>\n"}],"authors":[{"ID":4331,"user_firstname":"Aileen","user_lastname":"Buckley","nickname":"Aileen Buckley","user_nicename":"abuckley","display_name":"Aileen Buckley","user_email":"abuckley@esri.com","user_url":"","user_registered":"2018-03-02 00:15:57","user_description":"Dr. Aileen Buckley is a cartographer researcher and Senior Principal GIS Engineer at Esri. I'm on the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World Team, making, writing, and talking about maps. I'm also involved in a number of cartographic societies and association, and I'm the chair of the ICA Ethics in Cartography Commission.","user_avatar":""}]},"yoast_head":"\nGetting better vectors from your rasters with ArcScan<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/arcgis-blog\/products\/product\/mapping\/getting-better-vectors-from-your-rasters-with-arcscan\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Getting better vectors from your rasters with ArcScan\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/arcgis-blog\/products\/product\/mapping\/getting-better-vectors-from-your-rasters-with-arcscan\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"ArcGIS Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" 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