[R] Importing BSQ/BIP/BIL files into R

[Uwe Ligges]

Jonathan Greenberg wrote:

> I was hoping I could get some help with an import question.  I work with
> remote sensing imagery which commonly comes in binary form in various
> interleaving formats (byte interleaved by line, by pixel, etc..).  These
> files are 2d spatial x B bands in size, and I want to be able to extract the
> band values from various pixels (so each line of data into R would be one
> pixel x B bands).
> 
> What's the easiest way of importing this type of data?  These files are
> often massive (4 - 16gb), so is there a way of having R read the lines of
> the data as I am running the process, rather than trying to load the whole
> image into memory at once?  Thanks!  For those of you with remote sensing
> experience, I'm using RSI's ENVI package.
> 
> --j
> 

See ?connections which points you to many other function that help you 
to deal with reading in single values / blocks of values from a file.

Uwe ligges