Point in Polygon & Intersect¶
Finding out if a certain point is located inside or outside of an area, or finding out if a line intersects with another line or polygon are fundamental geospatial operations that are often used e.g. to select data based on location. Such spatial queries are one of the typical first steps of the workflow when doing spatial analysis. Performing a spatial join (will be introduced later) between two spatial datasets is one of the most typical applications where Point in Polygon (PIP) query is used.
How to check if point is inside a polygon?¶
Computationally, detecting if a point is inside a polygon is most commonly done using a specific formula called Ray Casting algorithm. Luckily, we do not need to create such a function ourselves for conducting the Point in Polygon (PIP) query. Instead, we can take advantage of Shapely’s binary predicates that can evaluate the topolocical relationships between geographical objects, such as the PIP as we’re interested here.
There are basically two ways of conducting PIP in Shapely:
- using a function called .within() that checks if a point is within a polygon
- using a function called .contains() that checks if a polygon contains a point
Notice: even though we are talking here about Point in Polygon operation, it is also possible to check if a LineString or Polygon is inside another Polygon.
- Let’s first create a Polygon using a list of coordinate-tuples and a couple of Point objects
from shapely.geometry import Point, Polygon
# Create Point objects
p1 = Point(24.952242, 60.1696017)
p2 = Point(24.976567, 60.1612500)
# Create a Polygon
coords = [(24.950899, 60.169158), (24.953492, 60.169158), (24.953510, 60.170104), (24.950958, 60.169990)]
poly = Polygon(coords)
# Let's check what we have
In [1]: print(p1)
POINT (24.952242 60.1696017)
In [2]: print(p2)