centerlines from polygon canal network

[GregoryLuna_Golya1]

Hello,

I was wondering if anybody has recently converted a complex polygon or raster canal network to centerlines? ESRI toolboxes or third party tools are moving targets so some of the old threads are hard to apply. The canal polygon network that I have was created by cutting out nearly 20,000 mounds and agricultural beds from a shallow lake system (archaeological example). The remaining canal polygon network is one large complex polygon. I converted it to a raster and tried the raster to polyline tool but ended up with a polyline feature class that filled in the canal cells with 800 million lines after running for a couple days. Obviously, not what I was looking. I didn't try the ArcScan vectorization since my raster was 1 or no data and ArcScan requires a 2 value raster. I can convert my raster and give that a try. Not sure if there is a method to convert my complex polygon directly to lines (centerlines). I'll attribute the resulting lines after the fact so I just need to create the skeleton or centerline features. Any ideas are welcome.

Thanks, Greg

[XanderBakker]

Hi Fatih Dur ,

There are a couple of tools you can use to calculate the optimal route between multiple points in raster format (you will need to have access to the Spatial Analyst extension. This will require a raster that contains the "cost" for each cell. Normally this is creating by weighting several layers using tools like http://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/latest/tools/spatial-analyst-toolbox/weighted-overlay.htm. The resulting raster will be used in the cost distance tool to create a cost distance raster (cost for each cell calculated from one or multiple sources)  and a back link raster that indicates for each cell the location of the neighboring cell with the lowest value. see: http://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/latest/tools/spatial-analyst-toolbox/cost-distance.htm. Using the cost distance and back link raster you run the last geoprocessing tool Cost Path that will create the route of the lowest cost from a destination location to the source. see http://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/latest/tools/spatial-analyst-toolbox/cost-path.htm

[GregoryLuna_Golya1]

Thanks for the feedback. I went with the ET GeoWizards' createCenterlines option. Pretty good results for my complex, messy dataset. Will require cleaning but was worth the investment. Greg