Raster Pyramids in deegree

Today I would like to talk about raster pyramids in deegree. Gone are the times where you have to use our custom tools to create pyramids and manually configure the different solutions.

In order to make the handling of raster pyramids easy we now support using standard GeoTIFF pyramids with overlays. Let me show you how to prepare your data and use it as coverage data source in deegree.


To prepare your data, you can use standard tools like GDAL. There are a couple of requirements that the processed data needs to meet:

• it must be a GeoTIFF, containing the extent and coordinate system of the data
• overlays must be multiples of 2

Assume you have a couple of raster files lying around in a directory, eg. png with .wld. First, build a GDAL virtual raster:

gdalbuildvrt virtual.vrt *png

Then, build the base GeoTIFF using gdalwarp:

gdalwarp -t_srs EPSG:26912 -co BIGTIFF=YES -co TILED=YES virtual.vrt merged.tif

The BIGTIFF option enables you to create files bigger than 4GB. There are a whole lot of other options (you can also compress the TIFF if you want), see the GDAL documentation for details.

Finally, calculate the overlays using gdaladdo. Take care to only use multiples of 2 for the overlays, like in this example:

gdaladdo -r average merged.tif 2 4 8 16 32

That's it, now you have a GeoTIFF ready to run. To configure it in deegree, simply add a new coverage data source using the web console and configure the location of your file.

All done! Now you can use it like any other coverage data source to configure your layers (or a WCS). The files can be very big, I've already tested it with ~150GB files (my lack of disk space prevented testing bigger files).

The implementation was done using the standard TIFF driver from imageio-ext, which has support for BigTIFF without the need for JNI libraries (imageio-ext also has support for GDAL using JAI, but I didn't use that one). Many thanks to the developers for making this easy!

Edit: Removed references to images. I was wondering where all my screenshots went. Seems it had something to do with joining Google+. But I'm not taking the effort to recreate the screenshots here (you should read the deegree handbook anyway, and use the new tile stores instead of this one).