Fasterize: Fast Polygon to Raster Conversion for R

Fasterize provides a drop-in replacement for the rasterize() function in R's 'raster' package, offering significantly faster performance. It was created by Noam Ross and implements the scan line algorithm attributed to Wylie et al. (1967). The tool supports main rasterization options, including setting the field used and background value, and aggregating multi-layer rasters.

Use Cases

• Accelerating land cover classification workflows based on polygon-to-raster conversion.
• Creating high-resolution environmental rasters based on support for multi-layer raster aggregation.
• Generating raster masks from administrative boundaries based on field and background value options.

Strengths

• Implements a known efficient algorithm (scan line algorithm) for performance gains.
• Designed as a drop-in replacement, suggesting compatibility with existing 'raster' package workflows.

Limitations

• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Noam Ross

Collection Method

Software package providing a function for polygon rasterization.