Data Analysis

Global Mapper contains a wide variety of tools for creating and working with geospatial data. Below these tools are organized by the type of data they are designed for.

Vector data includes points, lines, and polygons. Vector features can also have attributes. Some vector features also contain per vertex attributes and / or height values that convert them to 3D vectors.

lidar data is a special type of vector data that stores large sets of 3-Dimensional point clouds in an efficient manner. While the term lidar is used throughout the tools, the tools can be used on a wide variety of 3D point clouds, and not just those specifically collected with a lidar system, such as photo-generated point clouds and hydrology datasets.

Imagery includes things like satellite imagery, aerial imagery, and palette images like land-use and land-cover maps. Imagery may contain one or more bands, that are typically an integer format.

Terrain data is a type of raster data where the pixel values represent some kind of quantity that can be measured as a height. Most commonly that would be an elevation value, but could also include other measured quantities like temperature or NDVI. This a single band image of either integer or floating point values.