**GIPPY**: Geospatial Image Processing for Python

AUTHOR: Matthew Hanson
EMAIL:  matt.a.hanson@gmail.com

Copyright (C) 2015 Applied Geosolutions

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

GIPPY is a library of python bindings to a C++ library called GIPS. GIPS is built on top of GDAL and CImg, an image processing template library. GIPPY provides a similar, yet simpler interface than GDAL for opening, creating, and reading geospatial raster files. Convenience functions have been added to make common tasks achievable with fewer lines of code.

Most notably GIPPY adds image processing functionality on top of GDAL for easier automation of processing functions. The main objects in the GIPPY library are the GeoRaster, which is a single raster band, and a GeoImage, which is a collection of GeoRaster objects (possibly from different files). GeoImage and GeoRaster objects support various processing operations (e.g., +, -, log, abs) that can be chained together and saved as a processing chain. The processing does not actually occur until the file is read (frequently followed by a write to a new file). Reading may also occur in chunks, thereby facilitating the processing of very large files.