WhiteboxTools is an advanced geospatial data analysis platform developed by Prof. John Lindsay (webpage; jblindsay) at the University of Guelph's Geomorphometry and Hydrogeomatics Research Group. WhiteboxTools can be used to perform common geographical information systems (GIS) analysis operations, such as cost-distance analysis, distance buffering, and raster reclassification. Remote sensing and image processing tasks include image enhancement (e.g. panchromatic sharpening, contrast adjustments), image mosaicing, numerous filtering operations, simple classification (k-means), and common image transformations.
WhiteboxTools also contains advanced tooling for spatial hydrological analysis (e.g. flow-accumulation, watershed delineation, stream network analysis, sink removal), terrain analysis (e.g. common terrain indices such as slope, curvatures, wetness index, hillshading; hypsometric analysis; multi-scale topographic position analysis), and LiDAR data processing. LiDAR point clouds can be interrogated (LidarInfo, LidarHistogram), segmented, tiled and joined, analyized for outliers, interpolated to rasters (DEMs, intensity images), and ground-points can be classified or filtered. WhiteboxTools is not a cartographic or spatial data visualization package; instead it is meant to serve as an analytical backend for other data visualization software, mainly GIS.
Although WhiteboxTools is intended to serve as a source of plugin tools for the Whitebox GAT open-source GIS project, the tools contained in the library are stand-alone and can run outside of the larger Whitebox GAT project. See Usage for further details. There have been a large number of requests to call Whitebox GAT tools and functionality from outside of the Whitebox user-interface (e.g. from Python automation scripts). WhiteboxTools is intended to meet these usage requirements.
Eventually most of the approximately 400 tools contained within Whitebox GAT will be ported to WhiteboxTools. In addition to separating the processing capabilities and the user-interface (and thereby reducing the reliance on Java), this migration should significantly improve processing efficiency. This is because Rust, the programming language used to develop WhiteboxTools, is generally faster than the equivalent Java code and because many of the WhiteboxTools functions are designed to process data in parallel wherever possible. In contrast, the older Java codebase included largely single-threaded applications.
https://github.com/jblindsay/whitebox-tools
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