GDAL is a translator library for raster and vector geospatial data formats

• gdal.org

GDAL supports reading and writing in a plethora of raster and vector formats. And, while GeoTrellis supports a few of the most popular, there's currently no plan to achieve format parity with GDAL. If you'd like to work with an esoteric format (which GDAL supports), you're in luck: geotrellis.gdal leans on GDAL to effectively extend the range of formats with which GeoTrellis can work.

NOTE: Using the geotrellis.gdal module requires a working installation of GDAL's java bindings.

In the following example, we will look at the code necessary to attempt a read of an HDF5 raster band. The result of a successful reading is an tuple of the form (geotrellis.raster.Tile, geotrellis.raster.RasterExtent).

import geotrellis.gdal._

val firstBand: (Tile, RasterExtent) =
  GdalReader.read(path = "/path/to/my/file.he5", band = 1)

Note that the band parameter specifies the band to be read and turned into a tile rather than the number of bands expected.