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r.out.mat

Exports a GRASS raster to a binary MAT-File.

r.out.mat input=name output=name [--overwrite] [--verbose] [--quiet] [--qq] [--ui]

Example:

r.out.mat input=name output=name

grass.script.run_command("r.out.mat", input, output, overwrite=False, verbose=False, quiet=False, superquiet=False)

Example:

gs.run_command("r.out.mat", input="name", output="name")

Parameters

input=name [required]
    Name of input raster map
output=name [required]
    Name for output binary MAT file
--overwrite
    Allow output files to overwrite existing files
--help
    Print usage summary
--verbose
    Verbose module output
--quiet
    Quiet module output
--qq
    Very quiet module output
--ui
    Force launching GUI dialog

input : str, required
    Name of input raster map
    Used as: input, raster, name
output : str, required
    Name for output binary MAT file
    Used as: output, file, name
overwrite: bool, optional
    Allow output files to overwrite existing files
    Default: False
verbose: bool, optional
    Verbose module output
    Default: False
quiet: bool, optional
    Quiet module output
    Default: False
superquiet: bool, optional
    Very quiet module output
    Default: False

DESCRIPTION

r.out.mat will export a GRASS raster map to a MAT-File which can be loaded into Matlab or Octave for plotting or further analysis. Attributes such as map title and bounds will also be exported into additional array variables.

Specifically, the following array variables are created:

  • map_data
  • map_name
  • map_title (if it exists)
  • map_northern_edge
  • map_southern_edge
  • map_eastern_edge
  • map_western_edge

In addition, r.out.mat makes for a nice binary container format for transferring georeferenced maps around, even if you don't use Matlab or Octave.

NOTES

r.out.mat exports a Version 4 MAT-File. These files should successfully load into more modern versions of Matlab and Octave without any problems.

Everything should be Endian safe, so the resultant file can be simply copied between different system architectures without binary translation.

As there is no IEEE value for NaN for integer maps, GRASS's null value is used to represent it within these maps. You'll have to do something like this to clean them once the map is loaded into Matlab:

    map_data(find(map_data < -1e9)) = NaN;

Null values in maps containing either floating point or double-precision floating point data should translate into NaN values as expected.

r.out.mat must load the entire map into memory before writing, therefore it might have problems with huge maps. (a 3000x4000 DCELL map uses about 100mb RAM)

GRASS defines its map bounds at the outer-edge of the bounding cells, not at the coordinates of their centroids. Thus, the following Matlab commands may be used to determine the map's resolution information:

    [rows cols] = size(map_data)
    x_range = map_eastern_edge - map_western_edge
    y_range = map_northern_edge - map_southern_edge
    ns_res = y_range/rows
    ew_res = x_range/cols

EXAMPLE

In Matlab, plot with either:

imagesc(map_data), axis equal, axis tight, colorbar

or

contourf(map_data, 24), axis ij, axis equal, axis tight, colorbar

TODO

Add support for exporting map history, category information, color map, etc.
Option to export as a version 5 MAT-File, with map and support information stored in a single structured array.

SEE ALSO

r.in.mat
r.out.ascii, r.out.bin
r.null
The Octave project

AUTHOR

Hamish Bowman
Department of Marine Science
University of Otago
New Zealand

SOURCE CODE

Available at: r.out.mat source code (history)
Latest change: Friday Feb 07 19:16:09 2025 in commit a82a39f