is_los_visible: Check line of sight between pairs of point locations

In gdalraster: Bindings to 'GDAL'

Check line of sight between pairs of point locations

Description

is_los_visible() is an interface to GDAL's line-of-sight algorithm implemented by GDALIsLineOfSightVisible() in the Algorithms C API (https://gdal.org/en/stable/api/gdal_alg.html). It checks line of sight across a DEM surface using a Bresenham algorithm. The function can operate pairwise on sets of input points, or one-to-many. Requires GDAL >= 3.9.

Usage

is_los_visible(
  dem,
  ptsA,
  ptsB,
  band = 1L,
  srsA = NULL,
  srsB = NULL,
  ZinterpA = "RELATIVE_TO_DEM",
  ZinterpB = "RELATIVE_TO_DEM",
  quiet = FALSE
)

Arguments

dem	Either a character string giving the filename of the DEM raster, or an object of class GDALRaster for the DEM.
ptsA	A data frame or numeric matrix containing geospatial point coordinates, or point geometries (with Z values) as a list of WKB raw vectors or character vector of WKT strings. If data frame or matrix, the number of columns must be three (x, y, z). May be also be given as a numeric vector for one point (c(x, y, z)). If this argument contains a single point, then line of sight will be checked between it and each point in ptsB, otherwise length(ptsA) must equal length(ptsB), and line of sight will be checked pairwise.
ptsB	The second set of points, as described above for ptsA.
band	An integer value specifying the band number in dem to use. Defaults to 1L.
srsA	An optional character string specifying the spatial reference system for ptsA. May be in WKT format or any of the formats supported by srs_to_wkt(). If this argument is NULL (the default), then ptsA are assumed to be in the same coordinate reference system as dem. Otherwise, ptsA will be reprojected from srsA to the spatial reference of dem.
srsB	An optional character string specifying the spatial reference system for ptsB (see above). Defaults to NULL. If not NULL, ptsB will be reprojected from srsB to the spatial reference of dem.
ZinterpA	A character string specifying the interpretation of the Z values for ptsA. The default is "RELATIVE_TO_DEM", in which case the location heights of ptsA are obtained by querying the DEM surface and adding the Z value given in ptsA. Alternatively, the Z values can be interpreted as absolute heights to be used unmodified by setting this argument to "ACTUAL".
ZinterpB	A character string specifying the interpretation of the Z values for ptsB. See the description above for ZinterpA.
quiet	A logical value with default of FALSE. If set to TRUE, will suppress a progress bar and informational messages.

Value

A logical vector of length(ptsB), TRUE for each pair of points that are within line of sight, otherwise FALSE. The checks are done pairwise if (length(ptsA) == length(ptsB)), or one-to-many if length(ptsA) == 1 and multiple points are given in ptsB.

Note

Input coordinates must be within the raster bounds. NA will be returned if either coordinate is outside the raster extent, or is missing a Z value.

The GDAL documentation notes that line of sight is computed in raster coordinate space, and thus may not be appropriate for some applications. For example, datasets referenced against geographic coordinates at high latitudes may have issues.

At the time of writing (GDAL 3.9 through 3.12.2), a point exactly on the surface of the DEM is never visible with GDALIsLineOfSightVisible(), even if viewed from a point directly above. For a detailed description, see https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/12458. A workaround for that case could be to set a small but negligible positive Z value (if using "RELATIVE_TO_DEM") for points that are intended to be on the DEM surface, if appropriate for the use case.

See Also

Efficient Line-of-Sight Algorithms for Real Terrain Data

Examples

dem <- system.file("extdata/storml_elev.tif", package="gdalraster")

## no reprojection, the point coordinates are in the same projection as DEM

## one-to-many
ptA <- c(324625.0, 5104724.0, 1.7)
ptsB <-c(324803.0, 5104517.0, 10,
         325286.0, 5102923.0, 10,
         323847.0, 5104538.0, 10)
ptsB <- matrix(ptsB, nrow = 3, ncol = 3, byrow = TRUE)

is_los_visible(dem, ptA, ptsB)

## pairwise, same ptA location with varying height
ptsA <- c(324625.0, 5104724.0, 1,
          324625.0, 5104724.0, 10,
          324625.0, 5104724.0, 1000)
ptsA <- matrix(ptsA, nrow = 3, ncol = 3, byrow = TRUE)

is_los_visible(dem, ptsA, ptsB)

## WKB points
(ptsA_wkb <- g_create("POINT", ptsA))

# as WKT
g_wk2wk(ptsA_wkb)

# or as ISO WKT
g_wk2wk(ptsA_wkb, as_iso = TRUE)

is_los_visible(dem, ptsA_wkb, ptsB)

## reprojecting ptsA, and the DEM given as a dataset object
(ds <- new(GDALRaster, dem))

ptsA_wkb_wgs84 <- g_transform(ptsA_wkb, ds$getSpatialRef(), "WGS84")
g_wk2wk(ptsA_wkb_wgs84)

is_los_visible(ds, ptsA_wkb_wgs84, ptsB, srsA = "WGS84")

## read ptsB from a vector dataset, use original ptA

dsn <- system.file("extdata/storml_los_pts_b.geojson", package="gdalraster")
(lyr <- new(GDALVector, dsn))

(features <- lyr$fetch(-1))

is_los_visible(ds, ptA, features$geom, srsB = lyr$getSpatialRef(),
               ZinterpB = "ACTUAL")

ds$close()
lyr$close()

gdalraster documentation built on March 25, 2026, 9:07 a.m.