I need an utility to use GDALPolygonize in R. As far as I know the routine is not implemented in R. At least it does not come with rgdal package.

I made a simple implementation of the C API GDALPolygonize tool. It mimics what python gdal_polygonize.py program does (i.e. it is a wraper for gdal/alg/polygonize.cpp). It has limitations:

• It does not keep any of the creations options (I omitted the papszOptions argument).
• The output is always in “ESRI Shapefile” file format.

Migrate to windows was tricky. I used the GDAL version distributed by rwinlib: Static libraries for building R packages on Windows. I borrowed both the Makevars.win file and the tools/winlibs.R from rgdal.

GDAL Github page

GDAL official webpages

rgdal project

rwinlib project

Install the current development from github via:

remotes::install_github("fcorra/GDALPolygonize")