What is raster data?

In its simplest form, a raster consists of a matrix of cells (or pixels) organized into rows and columns (or a grid) where each cell contains a value representing information, such as temperature. Rasters are digital aerial photographs, imagery from satellites, digital pictures, or even scanned maps.

The cells in a raster

Data stored in a raster format represents real-world phenomena:

Thematic and continuous rasters may be displayed as data layers along with other geographic data on your map but are often used as the source data for spatial analysis with the ArcGIS Spatial Analyst extension. Picture rasters are often used as attributes in tables—they can be displayed with your geographic data and are used to convey additional information about map features.

Learn more about thematic and continuous data

While the structure of raster data is simple, it is exceptionally useful for a wide range of applications. Within a GIS, the uses of raster data fall under four main categories:

Why store data as a raster?

Sometimes you don't have the choice of storing your data as a raster; for example, imagery is only available as a raster. However, there are many other features (such as points) and measurements (such as rainfall) that could be stored as either a raster or a feature (vector) data type.

The advantages of storing your data as a raster are as follows:

There are other considerations for storing your data as a raster that may convince you to use a vector-based storage option. For example:

Learn more about representing features in a raster dataset

General characteristics of raster data

In raster datasets, each cell (which is also known as a pixel) has a value. The cell values represent the phenomenon portrayed by the raster dataset such as a category, magnitude, height, or spectral value. The category could be a land-use class such as grassland, forest, or road. A magnitude might represent gravity, noise pollution, or percent rainfall. Height (distance) could represent surface elevation above mean sea level, which can be used to derive slope, aspect, and watershed properties. Spectral values are used in satellite imagery and aerial photography to represent light reflectance and color.

Cell values can be either positive or negative, integer, or floating point. Integer values are best used to represent categorical (discrete) data and floating-point values to represent continuous surfaces. For additional information on discrete and continuous data, see Discrete and continuous data. Cells can also have a NoData value to represent the absence of data. For information on NoData, see NoData in raster datasets.

Cell values are applied to the center point or whole area of a cell

Rasters are stored as an ordered list of cell values, for example, 80, 74, 62, 45, 45, 34, and so on.

rasters are stored as an ordered list

The area (or surface) represented by each cell consists of the same width and height and is an equal portion of the entire surface represented by the raster. For example, a raster representing elevation (that is, digital elevation model) may cover an area of 100 square kilometers. If there were 100 cells in this raster, each cell would represent 1 square kilometer of equal width and height (that is, 1 km x 1 km).

cell width and height

The dimension of the cells can be as large or as small as needed to represent the surface conveyed by the raster dataset and the features within the surface, such as a square kilometer, square foot, or even square centimeter. The cell size determines how coarse or fine the patterns or features in the raster will appear. The smaller the cell size, the smoother or more detailed the raster will be. However, the greater the number of cells, the longer it will take to process, and it will increase the demand for storage space. If a cell size is too large, information may be lost or subtle patterns may be obscured. For example, if the cell size is larger than the width of a road, the road may not exist within the raster dataset. In the diagram below, you can see how this simple polygon feature will be represented by a raster dataset at various cell sizes.

raster feature cell size

The location of each cell is defined by the row or column where it is located within the raster matrix. Essentially, the matrix is represented by a Cartesian coordinate system, in which the rows of the matrix are parallel to the x-axis and the columns to the y-axis of the Cartesian plane. Row and column values begin with 0. In the example below, if the raster is in a Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) projected coordinate system and has a cell size of 100, the cell location at 5,1 would be 300,500 East, 5,900,600 North.

Coordinate location

Learn about transforming the raster dataset

Often you need to specify the extent of a raster. The extent is defined by the top, bottom, left, and right coordinates of the rectangular area covered by a raster, as shown below.

raster extents

Related Topics

5/18/2014