Access ArcScan from Python?

[RobinWilson]

Hi,

Is there any way to access the tools in the ArcScan extension from within a Python script? I particularly want to use the ArcScan vectorisation tool from within my script.

Alternatively, is there any other semi-intelligent vectorisation tool I can use from within my python scripts? The standard Raster to Polyline conversion doesn't seem to cope at all well with my data.

Cheers,

Robin

[DanPatterson_Retired]

If you examine the tools in arctoolbox and see a Python example, then the answer would be yes, if not, then I would say no, and I haven't seen any reference to arcscan within arcpy

[JeffLee]

If the tool is not in the toolbox, it's unlikely that you will be able to use it in python.  However, you may want to use the thin tool in spatial analyst to reduce the width of your features before converting your raster to vector.  The thin tool is accessible in python.

[V_StuartFoote]

Robin,

No python scripting in ArcScan?  Maybe no problem. Think remote sensing of your raster scan or source document image.

I have not tried it, but with a Spatial Analyst license, the included Image Classification has ArcPy modules for supervised classification. They would let you script to achieve the same things that ArcScan does with bimodal rasters.  You would probably have to do some training on your images.

Maybe not all the bells and whistles--line weights, annotation breaks and such, but should be able to extract usable polygon features and then convert to polyline if needed.

Also, both the ERDAS Imagine and ITT-Visual ENVI 3rd Party extensions to ArcGIS 10 allow you to script in Python--and they provide a richer set of tools for supervised and unsupervised classification and feature class extraction work flows/geoprocessing--probably effective replacements for ArcScan.

Stuart