DESCRIPTION
r.surf.nnbathy is an Bourne Shell and Awk script. It is an
interface between the external nnbathy utility and GRASS.
nnbathy is a surface interpolation program provided with
nn - a natural neighbor
interpolation library, written by Pavel Sakov.
r.surf.nnbathy provides 3 interpolation algorithms. According to
nn library documentation these are: Delaunay interpolation
(alg=l), Watson's algortithm for Sibson natural neighbor
interpolation (alg=nn) and Belikov and Semenov's algorithm for
non-Sibsonian natural neighbor interpolation (alg=ns). For performing
the underlaying Delaunay triangulation in all cases nnbathy uses
triangle software by
Jonathan Richard Shewchuk.
The output raster map is a continous surface interpolated from the
input raster map.
nnbathy, if built with '-DNN_SERIAL' (default as of nn 1.85), is
able to create a grid of virtually any size. It interpolates and writes one
output point at a time only. This eliminates the necessity to hold the whole
output array in memory. However, even then all the input cells are still
held in the memory.
NOTES
1. Requires GRASS 6.x and nnbathy 1.76 or greater.
2. Build nnbathy according to instructions provided with its source
code and put it somewhere in your $PATH.
3. The output raster map extent and resolution match the region settings at
which the script was started.
4. The output raster map non-NULL area is limited to the convex hull
encompassing all the non-NULL input cells.
5. The output is double floating point raster map.
6. Natural neighbor is a an exact interpolation algorithm, so all
non-NULL input cells have their value exactly preserved in the output.
7. There is circa 0.2 KB memory overhead per each input cell.
However, the output grid can be of any size, if nnbathy is
built with -DNN_SERIAL switch.
8. r.surf.nnbathy creates 3 temporary files: ASCII x,y,z lists of
the input and output cells, and the output list converted into GRASS ASCII
format. Then it makes a GRASS raster map from the latter - and only then it
removes the 3 temp files, when the script terminates. Thus, at the script
run time several times more disk space might be required, than the final
GRASS raster map would actually occupy.
I'd like to thank Pavel Sakov for his help, and especially for implementing
serial input processing.
SEE ALSO
v.to.rast,
v.surf.nnbathy (AddOn)
AUTHOR
Maciej Sieczka
Last changed: $Date$