Hexagonal Raster Bin

Question

Hi Community!

I've done a bit of digging and it seems to me that the only tessellation shape a raster file can be is squares.

Does anyone know whether it's possible to produce a hexagonal raster file, for example, as output for KDE? I'm familiar with the hotspot optimization tools, but I'm specifically interested in raster output.

Sorry if this question has already been asked/answered elsewhere. If it was, I overlooked it.

Thanks!

quillaja · Answer

Practically speaking, you're correct. But just to play the hexagonal devil's advocate, there is some published literature about hexagonal images that suggest it is not only possible but is used in some applications.

Middleton and Sivaswamy. 2005. "Hexagonal Image Processing: A Practical Approach". https://doi.org/10.1007/1-84628-203-9

Li. 2013. "Storage and addressing scheme for practical hexagonal image processing". Journal of Electronic Imaging. http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/1.JEI.22.1.010502

Tim_McGinnes · Answer

Short answer: No.

It is probably useful to think of grids. All of these grids can be created by the Generate Tesselation tool:

A raster by definition is a square grid* and computation is optimised based on that. Rasters just can’t be other grid types.

* Rasters can be created with different x and y cell sizes (a rectangular grid) but they are generally not supported by ArcGIS and may be automatically converted back to a square grid when using them in tools.