Overviews

Overviews are reduced resolution versions of your dataset that can speed up rendering when you don’t need full resolution. By precomputing the upsampled pixels, rendering can be significantly faster when zoomed out.

Overviews can be stored internally or externally, depending on the file format.

In some cases we may want to make a copy of the test data to avoid altering the original.

>>> import shutil
>>> path = shutil.copy('tests/data/RGB.byte.tif', '/tmp/RGB.byte.tif')

We must specify the zoom factors for which to build overviews. Commonly these are exponents of 2

>>> factors = [2, 4, 8, 16]

To control the visual quality of the overviews, the ‘nearest’, ‘cubic’, ‘average’, ‘mode’, and ‘gauss’ resampling alogrithms are available. These are available through the Resampling enum

>>> from rasterio.enums import Resampling

Creating overviews requires opening a dataset in r+ mode, which gives us access to update the data in place. By convention we also add a tag in the rio_overview namespace so that readers can determine what resampling method was used.

>>> import rasterio
>>> dst = rasterio.open(path, 'r+')
>>> dst.build_overviews(factors, Resampling.average)
>>> dst.update_tags(ns='rio_overview', resampling='average')
>>> dst.close()

We can read the updated dataset and confirm that the overviews are present

>>> src = rasterio.open(path, 'r')
>>> [src.overviews(i) for i in src.indexes]
[[2, 4, 8, 16], [2, 4, 8, 16], [2, 4, 8, 16]]
>>> src.tags(ns='rio_overview').get('resampling')
'average'

And to leverage the overviews, we can perform a decimated read at a reduced resolution which should allow libgdal to read directly from the overviews rather than compute them on-the-fly.

>>> src.read().shape
(3, 718, 791)
>>> src.read(out_shape=(3, int(src.height / 4), int(src.width / 4))).shape
(3, 179, 197)