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How to expand LineString centerline into a rectangular polygon in PostGIS?

I have a table containing LineString geometries (SRID=4326). Given that line, I also have a "left" and "right" value in miles for each row. They may not always be equal.

I want to produce a polygon from that LineString that is properly expanded on each side in miles to form a resulting rectangle.

I was trying to adapt this solution here so far without success: https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/60655/polygon-to-fill-gap

I can generate two parallel lines with ST_OffsetCurve(), but haven't been able to create the polygon so far. Thanks a lot for any suggestions!

Solution

  • You can create a minimum bounding rectangle for your linestring geometry. The function in postgis you can use is ST_Envelope. See https://postgis.net/docs/ST_Envelope.html for some examples. If you have this rectangle, you can expand it with your given left and right values. See function ST_Expand https://postgis.net/docs/ST_Expand.html

    Updated my answer (according to the screenshots): You can do the following steps to create your desired geometry in postgis.

    drop table linetest;
--create table to test
create table linetest (
    id serial not null,
    geom geometry,
    parallel_geom geometry,
    union_lines geometry,
    polygon_geom geometry   
);
--insert sample linestring
insert into linetest (geom) values (
    ST_GeomfromEWKT('SRID=4326; LINESTRING(100 100, 200 200)')
);
--create parallel linestring (query your field dx or dy for the parallel value here)
update linetest set parallel_geom = (
    select ST_OffsetCurve(geom,
    -15, -- here you can parametrize your offset
    'quad_segs=4 join=round')
);
--union the 2 lines to get one geometry as a multilinestring
update linetest set union_lines = (
    select ST_Union(geom, parallel_geom)
);
--create polygon with function convex hull out of the multilinestring
update linetest set polygon_geom = (
    select ST_ConvexHull(union_lines)
);
--check your result
select ST_ASTEXT (polygon_geom) from linetest;

    I visualized the situation in qgis, see image: Convex Hull